


Ashes Of Dreams

by MiChiAzalie



Series: Evening Stars Between Dreams And Reality [2]
Category: Fate/EXTRA, Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Smut, F/M, I'm tagging as I go really, Identity Issues, Male and Female Hakuno, Romance, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, tagging is hard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:47:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26613946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiChiAzalie/pseuds/MiChiAzalie
Summary: Hakuno has never had many restful nights since leaving the Moon Cell; keeping a clear distinction between what was reality and dream was something she struggled with enough as is, but lately it was taking a turn for the worse.Master and Servant, called upon beyond the boundary of time by a strange sentient clockwork being and forced to navigate through someone else’s recollections, find out soon enough that reality is a much crueler mistress than dreams could ever hope to be; the rules of nature have been trampled with, and War is rearing its head.
Relationships: Gilgamesh | Archer/Kishinami Hakuno, Gilgamesh | Caster/Kishinami Hakuno
Series: Evening Stars Between Dreams And Reality [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1916653
Comments: 15
Kudos: 59





	1. Prologue: The Broken Sky

_“Tell me. What is your wish? What is that so-called predestination you say you'll definitely grant?”_

A voice cuts through the deadly silence of her universe of nothingness.

An easy to hear voice.

A hard to hear voice.

A familiar voice.

She has the passing thought that she’s been asked this very same question before by someone else, just phrased differently -or perhaps she was asked this at some later point in time, she’s not sure anymore, but the remembrance is there all the same.

She couldn't quite respond then, and she still can't now.

Still, for some reason, she feels she must answer, even if the answer is unsatisfactory, but it hurts to speak.

Why?

There’s liquid oozing out from somewhere in her face. Are her eyes bleeding? Her ears?

She reaches her hands out. She tries to open her eyes too but finds herself unable to, as though her eyelids had been stuck together, so her hands reach out for the nothingness.

Her fingertips touch nothing. Her arms drop.

The world she is at is black and empty -cold and monochrome. The air is thick, shrouded in a miasma the scent of which she can recognize as smoke -and something else. The wheezes of rancid air reeking of decay and lingering death are oppressive; overpowering.

When the sense of touch comes slowly back to her, she’s surprised to feel a pair of arms holding her to someone’s chest, almost in a cradling motion. When she finally thinks of herself to be strong enough to open her eyes, she finds herself staring up a sky tinted in burning red and grey -it’s like staring at a crumbling world breathing its last with her. The place feels familiar and at the same time it doesn’t; a city wiped off from the face of the planet that only she seemed to remember.

Multiple black fissures are in the sky, gaps that endlessly suck in the light of the moon and stars and from which she cannot take her eyes away.

The black tears in her vision seem to threaten to swallow everything inside their void, almost as if the world has cracks in it and is about to break apart with the slightest of touches. The more she looks into them, the more they grow in number and size, spreading as far as she could see.

The person above her shifts, they mumble something she cannot quite make out. Instinctively, she tries to move and shift her gaze up to them, the action feeling as though countless needles are being prickled into her skin, but regardless of how hard she tries, she can’t see their face. It is futile endeavor; it would take all of her remaining strength to avert her eyes from the scenery above, so all she’s able to stare at is a broken sky with blurry, cracked smudges of black over grey and red.

That person’s voice is trying to reach for her, but it hurts to listen; why does it hurt so?

That voice is trying to say something but for some reason it sounds muffled; it’s barely audible. Her head is filled with the sound of white-noise and of that of that voice trying to cut through.

Something much strident breaks through the static then. While it’s definitely louder, it also sounds distant. She’s not sure if she hears it outside her head or from within. Steadily, surely, for every passing second, the sound gets closer.

Footsteps.

There’s something approaching; even if she can’t see for herself, she can tell there’s something coming their way by the terrible sound they make as they step onto nearby debris. As they close the distance, the hands around her arms tighten their hold. She clings weakly to whoever’s holding her, nestling against the warmth of their chest and breathing them in. That’s all she can do for now.

_“…You.”_

A sibilant voice calls out from behind her, a voice that feels like it’s made of ice, calm yet powerful to be heard. Whoever’s cradling her in that tight grip digs their fingernails into her flesh upon hearing it, so hard they bruise the papery white of her skin. She tries to scream but no sounds come out of her mouth -she lacks the strength to even make a sound. There’s sweat clinging to her body now, but isn’t sweating a form the human body has to expel heat? So why does she sweat if she feels so… _cold_?

Still, she forces the pain away, forces herself to keep listening to what the voices have to tell.

She wants to listen.

She wants to know.

That was what she thought.

 _“…Do you have…”_ the voice continues, each word punctuated by a ragged breath and an even louder step.

_Something so precious that I can’t bring myself to fully forget, even when no one else seems to remember._

The static filling her head grows louder.

_“…the slightest idea…”_

_The shattered pieces of my memory cut through the skin of my hands as I try to grasp them._

Even through the white noise, for some reason, their voice still reaches her.

_I can faintly remember something nagging me in the back of my mind, trying to remind me of something…_

_“…of what you’ve just done?”_

_… but what was it?_

And suddenly, for a small, fleeting instant that might consist in only a very few seconds, the scenery around her disappears in a blur of the blackest of blacks and she’s falling down again, almost as if falling was the only thing she was allowed to do.

In that transient moment of falling, abruptly, she finds herself swept again into an embrace. There’s someone… carrying her.

As she lets herself be soothed by the rapid stutter of their heartbeat, strands of hair tickling her face, she feels a moment of clarity and weightlessness, as if she has finally caught up on to something, but that is soon shattered in pieces as well when her body falls again and hits a water-filled something.

She can’t see where she is, she doesn’t think she can open her eyes this time -her eyelids feel too heavy-, but she can still feel, and the sense of touch is the hardest to deceive; she’s no longer being pulled into an embrace, but rather there’s someone pushing her underwater until it’s getting harder to breath and even harder to remain conscious. Regardless of how much she thrashes around, whoever is pushing her down is relentless in their task and she doesn’t have the strength to fight back properly. The strangest twinkle of fear fills her whole body like never before at the realization.

Somehow, somewhere, she can still faintly hear a voice again. It strangely echoes, but the sound of it is not as hard to make out now; an easy to follow voice, a hard to hear voice; it’s a voice that she recognizes, the voice that had asked her that strange question all those years back, the voice that broke through her confusion as she stared at the vanishing sky with the black cracks that threatened to swallow everything in complete darkness.

 _“I shall not stand for the ambitions of some treacherous mage who dared to disrupt our rules of nature,”_ the voice says. They exhale heavily, as if the mere action of speaking was too much of an effort for them as well. “ _And for this… I must apologize, but I shall do the only thing I can for you.”_

She sensed a nervousness in their voice and body at the end, a nervousness she could have sworn it wasn’t there before.

Shadows swirl through her mind, eating away what little was left of her thoughts as her grip on reality slips further away. The voice keeps on echoing in the nothingness that her mind’s become.

Something warm touches her cheek, like a gentle caress, a touch against her straight-across bangs as they are swept away from her forehead -such a simple gesture, but so sweet, so nice, she wants to weep. Perhaps if the touch lasted long enough, she would never forget it…?

_…Is it really -over?_

_…Is this the end?_

_…Am I going to give up?_

_Losing ______…_

_Forgetting ______…_

_…All alone, by myself._

_Giving up, forgetting, disappearing…_

_Is it really… Okay…?_

A beat of humorless laughter reaches her as water rushes through her ears.

 _“I’ll be seeing you soon, Hakuno,”_ the voice murmurs.

There’s a sound like that of a lid hissing shut, and then everything is disappearing again, being dyed white. All sound blends into one as the world melts and starts disappearing. Everything is being lost and she is the only one who still remains in that white world, as even her own consciousness is being swallowed up in a familiar feeling.

The feeling before waking up.

* * *

Air rushes into her lungs in fast gasps.

“Can you hear me?”

The sound of a woman’s voice stirs her from her slumber, setting her free from the clutches of her deep sleep and dragging her roughly back to reality.

Wrong voice.

The first sense that comes back to her is that of hearing, and in that instant she wishes she could have stayed hearing nothing for some more time; there are people prancing and talking and yelling commands at each other in a language that she can’t understand but that she faintly recognizes as English, and it’s hurting her head, her mind struggling to keep up with everything that is happening in the background.

Are they angry? Why are they yelling?

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” the voice asks again.

Yes.

She can understand what she’s saying, but the other voices, the sounds, the _lights_ ; it’s more than she can bear. Her eyes are flickering open and then sliding shut in rapid succession because everything _is far too bright_ and it’s all so loud, and so painful. Do these people know how agonizing their voices are? How they make her head explode?

“Shhh. Concentrate on my voice alone. Ignore the rest, and open your eyes,” the woman urges, and her eyes try to flicker open at her command, but merely opening her eyes requires far too much energy, far too much effort.

However, bit by bit, her eyes begin to open and regain their focus, and then the world comes to life in an explosion of white, an all-consuming white that eats up her vision, a white so bright indeed that as soon as she opened her eyes, she felt the need to close them again, flinching as she gave out a weak groan of protest.

The theme of the room she’s awakened in, it seems, is a an ‘hygienic’, emotionless white.

She squints her eyes around the room when she feels she has more or less grown used to the light, hazy vision slowly coming into focus again. She hears the slow steady beeping of what she thinks is definitely a heart monitor, the electronic sound of which echoing in the room as it keeps on repeating. This new world she’s found herself awakening to smells terribly of bleach and antiseptic. The white sheets that pool all around her feel itchy against the skin of her barely clothed body.

The room she’s in is almost empty save for the bed she’s lying on, the unfamiliar machines connected to her and the crowd of people in white coats that stand around. While the place is foreign, it is not as foreign as the shock of instantaneous self-awareness as she transitioned from being asleep to simply ‘existing’, the abrupt realization that she ‘was’.

The room’s lights, the sounds, the smells, everything is way too much, and her mind is still too numb, her body too weak, and a feeling of nausea hits her hard as she tries to take it in all. Yet still, nevertheless, she pushes that sickening feeling back and tries to stand up, although she isn’t much successful. Perhaps she should have stopped her attempts when she realized she couldn’t lift her arms; that should have been enough indicator that her body just wasn’t going to respond to her commands, but it wasn’t until her third failed attempt at moving that she gave up, her half-lifted arm falling back into the bed with a slight bounce.

Her body feels like it hadn’t been used for nearly one hundred years or more. Her movements are slow and labored. The eyes of the people in the room don’t seem to ever leave her, watching her with seemingly keen interest, unsettlingly so. It makes her want to run far away from where she lays, but her legs won’t move no matter how much she wants them to.

The sound of unintelligible chattering in that foreign language she can’t keep up with coupled with the monotonous beeping of machines filling the room was already bad enough as it was; the _clack-clack-clack_ of someone’s high heels as they approach her bed is an even worse addition. It feels as though someone is drilling a hole into her head, the headache that is already forming behind her eyes only getting worse. There’s a scent of perfume lingering by as that person approaches, filling her nostrils with an overly sweet smell that makes her nose scrunch up.

The pounding headache is definitely getting worse.

When that terrible sound of high heels hitting against tile stops, she barely acknowledges the woman that is standing arms-crossed beside the bed she’s lying on, barely even flinches when a hand of hers goes to wipe off the sweat from her forehead. It’s a tentative, gentle touch, but she thinks -she’s sure of it- it’s wrong; her hands are too fine, too unsure, the touch too feathery-light.

It’s wrong. It’s terribly wrong.

“You are in no danger; of that you have my word. How are you feeling now?” the woman asks again, trying to sound reassuring.

Blearily, she directs her glassy eyes to her so that she can put a face to that voice. She doesn’t attempt to sit up this time, remaining in her laying position instead as she turns her head up to her direction.

Her brown eyes meet those of a middle-aged woman, black hair neatly tied in a tight bun that makes her long hair look shorter than what it really must be. Her caramel eyes have purplish circles under them and as she looks down on her it’s hard not to miss the tired expression that is on her face -seemingly the end-result of a handful of sleepless nights.

There’s an identification tag strapped to the front of her white coat. She squints her eyes to read it, the words blending a little bit together.

 _Dr. Haibara,_ she thinks it reads. There’s a name too, but it’s too small for her to read from her distance.

The doctor in white spoke quietly, as if she wasn’t sure that the ashen-faced, hollowed out girl before her was really awake, as if she was testing the waters. She sounded so worried and so _caring_ that it was just a bit ridiculous, coming from a voice that just moments before held so much bite in it.

It’s such a simple question, and yet, honestly, she’s not sure how to respond to that; she’s not sure how’s she’s feeling, other than unnaturally tired and lost. She supposes that if she has no other choice but to give her an answer, she would say she felt ‘alright’: after all, her heart was still beating and she was still breathing. That must mean, logically, that she is 'alright' -at least if ‘alright’ didn’t have a broader meaning beyond that of merely being alive, because if it had such a broader meaning, then she didn’t know what to think anymore.

Her eyes were still locked with those of that woman, and the guilt at leaving her unanswered was almost overwhelming even when she wasn’t sure she could give a proper answer to her inquiry. Regardless of the truth, she nods, unwilling to trust her voice, and receives a warm smile from her in return. The woman takes her hand in hers then, rubbing soothing circles in what the girl thinks must be meant to be a gesture of reassurance. Reassurance for what, she does not know.

“…Where am I…?” The girl’s voice is a dull rasp after being unused for who knows how long. Her brown eyes are a reflection of confusion as she stares back at the woman who’s clutching her hand. “…What… What day is it…?”

She had almost forgotten how her own voice sounded like.

“It’s August 16th 2036, Kishinami," the doctor’s voice is quiet when she answers, almost compassionate, even.

“…Kishinami?”

She looks at the woman quizzically, and she does not miss her sharp intake of breath, nor how the gleam in her eyes seem to betray her carefully blank expression.

She feels herself becoming a little more conscious, more grounded in this reality she’s woken up into as the doctor holds onto her hand even tighter and looks at her with an intensity that could have physically burned her skin.

“Yes. That is so. Kishinami Hakuno. That’s your name. Don’t you remember your name?” the woman asks quietly, with a note of uncertainty that brings discord to her otherwise self-assured voice.

She thinks she knows that emotion, that… hope in her voice. It’s even showing in her face now; there’s so much hope in her words that she could almost taste it.

Again, she doesn’t know what to respond.

_I don’t know._

_I don’t know._

_…Do I?_

Her head hurts worse. It hurts to think.

Her body trembles.

Because she does not know, she does not answer, but the woman insists.

“Do you know where you happen to be, Hakuno? How much do you remember? You must give me your most earnest answer, or else-”

The woman’s fingers have stopped drawing imaginary circles around her hand, lingering instead on her flesh. She stops listening, focusing on the woman’s face instead. Her eyes are downcast as they bore on a particular spot of her hand- and strangely enough, she finds herself wondering why it felt so… melancholic.

Her eyes instinctively drift to the spot that the black-haired woman is staring so intensely at. The hold the woman has on her hand suddenly tightens when she does -it hurts a little, but somehow she can’t bring herself to mind.

She’s not sure what she’s looking for. There’s nothing remarkable for her to see on the skin of her hand; it was unmarred, white, sickly so, alarmingly so, almost papery by the way it showed her blue veins way too clearly.

She’s not sure what she herself was expecting to see on it but-

“Hakuno…?”

-but something feels off. Something is _very_ wrong.

There's something wrong here.

Something's… not working.

“Hakuno.”

She jolts up. Her eyes leave her hand to focus instead on the older woman. She blinks up at her, a perplexed expression set on her face.

It takes her several moments, more than she’s willing to accept, to recognize that the woman had been speaking to her. She appears concerned, and by her expression the girl guessed she’s waiting for her to provide some kind of response, but she’s not sure what to say.

She sees the woman stare back at her carefully, the hopeful look somewhat dissipating into nothingness as conflicting emotions spread across her face -confusion, intrigue, disappointment, and a little bit of pain- as though she can’t settle for just one, until it finally did.

Resignation.

The woman is now scowling.

“…I see,” the woman speaks again softly before her voice breaks into a humorless laugh. Shaking her head, eyes closed, a hand goes to pinch the bridge of her nose. It’s a sad, self-deprecating sound. "Of course.”

The unsaid words hang in the air.

In less than a fraction of a moment, the warmth of the woman’s hand around hers disappears. She leaves her side in a hurry and starts speaking in that language again.

“ _I want her in a twenty-four-hour observation, and I want a complete set of blood work as well_ ,” her pronounced accent betrays unease. The scowl is ever present.

She doesn't want to upset her- though she's not sure why, something tells her she should care about whatever has unsettled her so.

Slowly, piece by piece, memories of emotions begin to return to the forgotten corners of her mind in a chaos of disarrayed thoughts, and with them the feeling of ‘ _something seems missing’_ turns to conviction.

Something _is_ missing, the realization so crushing that she even allowed herself to gasp in surprise.

She shouldn't be here, whatever godforsaken place this is.

Nothing makes sense at all.

This can’t be ‘alright’. She doesn’t think that any of this could be considered being ‘alright’.

…But, what is it? What is wrong?

“ _I will need an MRI scan, an electroencephalography as well and an electrolyte analysis_ _by before the end of the day_ -”

As the sound of people repeating commands and protocols blends in together, a black tear appears in her vision, opening wide on the ceiling. A large, large hole in the world that seems like it would swallow up everything.

A black tear that apparently only she could see.

She hears a snippet of a conversation, the voices coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

_Even if we fail, she has a brother, right? A direct relative should have the aptitude._

Her mouth dries until she’s sure she can taste ash.

Stop.

_No. It won’t be necessary. If she has even a little ______ left, that alone should-_

_Stopstopstopstopstopstopstop-_

“Hisoka!” in the distance, she hears someone call for the woman who had been tending to her in a panicked command.

Her breath quickens and comes in short gasps, cold sweat forming in the palms of her hands as she grabs onto the bedsheets for some sort of support. Panic rises in her again, more than she thought it was possible, as an all too familiar fear pressed down on her.

 _Stop, stop that_ , she heard someone say panickily, but she had no intention of obeying.

More of those black fissures are coming from the hole, spreading far beyond the ceiling as they grew in number. They cut through reality until the room seemed like it would break apart right there. The world around her crooks once more, the people there merely a blurred stain on a cracking canvas of black gaps.

_Sorry, Sis… I love you._

No matter how hard she tries, she just can’t force her heart to slow down. Bile burns in her gut until she feels she’s definitely going to gag. There’s a sweltering sensation of biting claws tearing at that her heart, burying deep inside like maggots eating through flesh to bone.

Her brain simply refused to understand.

Somewhere, in the midst of it, she realizes she’s screaming.

“ _Stage 3 sensory overload_ -!”

These feelings are infecting her mind.

Everything’s falling in pieces.

It’s breaking.

The world is breaking.

This is… too much.

Far too much.

“ _-relapsing_ -!”

She screams louder and thrashes even harder against the restraining hold of the coated people with jerky movements, like a fish out of water. The IV buried in her arm slips out. The ear-splitting scream echoing down the hallway had nurses running frantically into the room, as if expecting something terrible to have occurred.

Nothing is quite as she remembers it should be.

The hospital room starts to distort and crumble, swallowed up by a blackness so black it seems to have no end.

Complete darkness. Just like back then.

A cold realization washes over her as the gap in reality grows wider and wider right before her.

…Ah.

So that was it.

It was over.

It was final.

Before her mind can register what she’s doing, she finds herself shouting a name.

“--Gil!”

_Crack._

She hears the sound of something breaking, a flash of blinding red coming out of her hand-

-And then, there’s only darkness again.


	2. Chapter I: Witching Hour

_Once upon I time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, solid and unmistakably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man._

**-Zhuangzi**

* * *

_I remember, more or less._

_Sometimes it’s so clear, the recollection so sharp that I can almost taste it, like a sweet taste on the back of my tongue, of spiced wine, but also of something bitter. And then, sometimes, everything fades into a hazy blur. Echoes and whispers of familiar voices fill my head but leave me nothing onto which I can hold._

_I see fractured, splintered fragments of someone else’s half-lived life._

She was having that dream again.

There was something pulling at her leg. Something like corrosive filth, black and ugly, twisted and swirled around her, and before she knew it, she was pulled down into an inescapable void.

She was sinking into a pitch-black universe where she was alone.

Nothing is here.

Nothing can hear her.

Nothing can see her.

She’s not even looking at anything.

No one is here, except for her; in this never-ending darkness there’s only her, sinking and melting away. She’s not sure if she’s sitting, or if she’s standing. Even the very concept of time seems foreign. She keeps sinking and sinking for who knows how long, drifting away without matter and meaning and reason, until existing meant to live on and on and on without a beginning or end, with nothing to do but simply _be_.

In her strange universe of emptiness there’s no sky, no moon and no stars. She floated in a never-ending void where she alone was the star of that world, where the only things that remained constant were the darkness and herself, collecting dust in the depths of oblivion, unable even to die and disappear, saying no words, thinking no thoughts, but existing all the same even as her blood turned to ash. She continues to exist, endlessly, forever, trapped in a fragile world of rippling darkness.

As her existence seemed to span endlessly, she began to believe she would never see anything beyond the dark, lonely space she was thrown into.

But that’s -that’s all different now.

Something changed in her ever-constant universe of emptiness.

She can feel a gentle, warm caress touch the skin of her cheek.

She vaguely realized that she even had stopped falling.

Even more bizarre, she can feel fingertips on her arms. There is pressure on her skin- an intrusive stranger pulling her closer still to that foreign warmth.

_How wonderful._

_How lovely._

_How pleasant._

_How warm._

For one brief, fleeting moment, she feels a strange stirring of… _something_ … bubble up in her chest, an emotion she can’t place a name to.

Questions danced through her mind, unanswered.

A voice is calling to her. It barely reaches her but she’s sure it’s calling her name.

She thinks she knows this voice.

Recognition, a sense of remembrance, worms its way somewhere into the deeper crevices of her mind, and she’s so tantalizingly close to it she can almost feel it in her fingertips, and yet those shrouded secrets are well beyond her reach. The faint memories threatened to cut through the emptiness that enveloped her mind, but a deeper darkness within reached up to her, a voice that she didn’t know if it came from outside or within her head coaxing her to stay into this lonely plain of shadows that would never stop its turning.

 _“Sleep now,”_ it sweetly whispered _, “and forget.”_

 _But... I can’t,_ she whispered back to the darkness, whatever small doubts she had shattered, every shard a reflection of a forgotten memory.

_I can’t bear to forget what no one else seems to remember._

Suddenly, there’s a blinding flash of the reddest of reds, followed by a moment of white-hot pain, pain such as she had never experienced before, as though her ribs were being torn apart and then strong fingers take hold of her hand and pulled, not sure if upwards or downwards.

She hears screaming, wretched cries that came from everywhere and nowhere.

_“Sensory overload-”_

_“-We can’t ______ it hasn't passed testing… but with more time…!”_

_“We don’t have time!”_

_“Security breach-!”_

_“Haibara-san!”_

_“-the lights! Off the lights!”_

_“-sedative… get everyone out before… Relapsing-!”_

So loud, so many voices, so many sounds. Where is the silence of her universe of undulated darkness? Can’t she go back…?

She wants back, but she can’t.

Because as of that moment, she’s no longer the star of a pitch-black universe.

She’s no longer falling.

She ‘is’.

In the darkness, she called out a name.

 _“I’ll be seeing you soon, Hakuno,”_ someone tells her before color washed back into the world.

* * *

Hakuno woke up back on her room, laying sideways against a soft mattress, to the feeling of sweat sticking to her clothes, a heavy body that she recognizes as Gilgamesh’s twined around her like a fucking vine, and to a pounding headache, her mind a pool of distorted, mixed around visions as her eyes fluttered open. Her sleep had been restless and uneasy, and she felt worse than if she’d simply stayed awake all night.

Inexplicably, Gilgamesh had managed to both hog the sheets and _her_ , and now she laid clutched in his embrace in a tangled mess of sheets that twisted around her legs with no seeming way to break free, chin resting solidly on top of her head and arms secured tightly around her waist.

How he managed that without waking her sooner was a mystery. In fact, she wonders idly if _that_ had been the warmth that had roused her from her fragmented dream in the first place.

At this point, Hakuno didn't even try to make an effort to free herself from the mess he’s somehow managed to pull her in. This is something she has long since resigned herself to, although she has to wonder how someone who looked so ready to kill anyone if he was in a sour enough mood could _cuddle_ so much in his sleep. He’s truly a mess of contradictions.

This nightly habit of his doesn’t exactly help when she tries to reach a hand to rub at her tired eyes, careful enough so as to not wake him up; she manages in the end, but not without difficulty. Thankfully, he remained unmoving.

She was surprised that her hand returned wet with tears.

As she tried to wipe them away on the bed sheets, she really had to wonder if fate, destiny or whatever superior power that existed up there hated her that much so that it had to force her through this damned dream sequence every single night.

As of lately, this was the only thing she could dream about. It came to a point in which Hakuno started to think she was really getting sick, but that made little sense, did it?

She’d never had many restful nights since leaving the Moon Cell; keeping a clear distinction between what was reality and illusion was something she struggled with enough as is, but lately it was taking a turn for the worse. _This_ , and this being whatever filthy tricks her mind was playing on her tonight, was starting to border on the cruel. Perhaps this dream was not the worst she’s had in the past few months -sometimes, her mind decides to bombard her with images of her passage through the Moon Cell until she feels her own brain was laughing at her-, but this was still… this was _cruel_ but for an entirely different reason.

When her mind teases her with images of places and voices of people she thinks she should be familiar with, Hakuno was always met with a wave of nausea and pain. She tried not to think about them much -didn't want to-, but couldn't help but wonder why it hurt so much not to remember them; when she has these dreams, and in particular this dream of herself in a world of ruined skylines and broken skies, she’s left with a strange sense of nostalgia and, dare she say it, _emptiness_ , as if she had been somehow betrayed and thrown away against her will.

It was always the same; she dreams about the same story, watches the same people die time and time again, dreams of making the same huge mistakes time and time again and she ends up alone, always alone.

Every time she closed her eyes it was almost always to see some kind of fragmented memory the meaning of which she couldn’t and still can’t fully grasp. It felt like some kind of distant memory, which should be ridiculous in on itself considering she can’t possibly have memories of a place she’s never been in the first place.

She sighed quietly.

This was ridiculous, that was what it really was. All she had was a hazy, distant dream the meaning of which was probably no more important than the sound of a pebble being thrown into a pond. She’s shouldn’t be afraid nor have her sleep interrupted because of some strange, fragmented dreams, no matter how detailed they may be.

With some exterior light seeping through an opened window as her only source of light, she glanced at the bedside table with another sigh. The screen of the alarm clock blinked 2:00 and she wondered if it was worth going back to sleep, if she even could. Maybe she should; after all, she couldn't afford being tired for the rest of the day, and she usually didn't dream the same thing in consecutive succession.

Gilgamesh visibly stirred again, moving his body and adjusting his weight over her, and Hakuno suddenly found herself staying very still. He didn't seem to be awake yet, to which Hakuno let out a shaky breath of relief that she wasn’t aware she had been holding the whole time.

For some reason, that realization that he had pulled her closer in his sleep didn't make her panic as it would have a few months ago. Because now, his breath on top of her head and his arms curled around her in an attempt to both pull her closer and pin her in place feels like a reassurance -a bubble of comfort, something she hadn't realized she had been missing.

A pleasant warmth, just like her dreams.

Hakuno closed her eyes, tried to recall what she saw. Something about it unsettled her so, having the vague notion that something was definitely _missing,_ but just as she started to think about it again, she was quickly pulled away from that train of thought by the sound of Gilgamesh’s voice, thick with sleep.

“…What is with all this moving around…? …You move so much that… I woke up,” he mumbled.

Her bleary brown eyes opened again, coming into focus, and hypnotic red eyes stared back at her, pupils slit.

_Oh._

_Shit._

“Ah… you’re… awake?” she said dumbfounded, voice still laced with the last remnants of her sleep as well.

Her voice seemed to pull him out from his own half-asleep daze, because as she kept staring back at him, she noticed that an eerie glint was making itself manifest in the belligerent intensity of his eyes as they bored into hers; it was all Hakuno needed to suck in a breath and hold it there again, the anticipation killing her. It was actually a little bit difficult to fully describe the feelings a stare like that could coax out of anyone on the receiving end of it, but suffice to say it gave her deer-in-highlights syndrome.

Another second of silence went by before that stare turned completely predatory, any traces of sleep completely gone from his face.

He narrowed his eyes at her, completely awake, “Hm, that seems so, does it not? Although I wouldn’t be-”

What came afterwards happened too quickly and almost felt surreal; as much as Hakuno knew that most of what Gilgamesh did was out of pure whimsical impulse, she couldn’t find it in her to get used to it just yet. It happened all so fast in fact that she didn’t realize what was happening until it ended.

In a blur of fabrics, a cranky, sleep-deprived Gilgamesh rose up from his position in bed while she was still trapped in his embrace and, just as quickly, rolled them over to the other side of the bed, changing their positions so that he was straddling her instead.

“-if one certain _fool_ stopped moving in her sleep.”

With her back against the mattress, her messy brown hair sprawled all over the pillows and her hands pinned by his own in a grip firm enough to bind her in place but not quite enough to hurt, Hakuno’s still glassy and unfocussed eyes kept focusing on the King’s narrowed ones with no possible way to let go. They seemed to glow an ominous red as he watched her from his position on top of her. She could see he was glaring down at her.

Her breath caught in her throat, but no sound came out from her lips. Hakuno was stunned into silence as she took after her surroundings and came to the obvious realization that, oh damn, Gilgamesh had her pinned against the bed.

They both stared at each other silently, unblinkingly, for what felt like a while, Hakuno trying to make out the expression on his face in the darkness as Gilgamesh’s insistent stare gave her the impression he was trying to open a hole into her own soul. It was hard focusing on anything else other than him, really; Gilgamesh himself straddling her ate up her whole vision, and with the room being completely dark she was unable to see anything beyond him.

For a small moment, Hakuno noticed how a shadow passed over his features, which sent a tiny tremor through her. Was that what a cranky, sleep deprived Gilgamesh looked like? It was more terrifying than his usual self -but then, then that look was gone, gone so suddenly she could almost convince herself that it had merely been her imagination.

“Now, Hakuno,” he called her name then, voice deceptively sweet as it broke through the quietness of the room, pulling her away from her thoughts. “Do you know what time is it, _Hakuno_?” He asked quietly, her name stressed in a particularly scathing way, almost as if he wanted to convey with his voice alone that something unpleasant would come her way if she gave him a wrong answer. Even the small smile that graced his lips felt like it was testing her, tempting her to give him an answer they both knew would warrant punishment.

Punishment, huh.

Isn't he usually more direct with these kinds of things, though?

“Uh…” Still, she hesitated.

She knew exactly what time it was, but under his gaze she suddenly felt tongue tied.

“Well? Do you not?”

The smirk that was upon his lips showed white teeth in a perfect smile.

Hakuno was starting to think he had some kind of sensor or something that could tell him when his intimidation strategies were working because he looked and sounded disgustingly satisfied with himself and she hadn’t even said anything yet.

When words still refused to come out of her lips, Gilgamesh gripped her temples with both hands and leaned down, his face now mere inches away from hers as if the sudden, invasive closeness would somehow help him make his point across. Despite herself, Hakuno felt a little bit of heat pass through her face and was somewhat grateful that the darkness helped in concealing her embarrassment. From this short distance, noses almost touching, it was impossible not to see the expression his garnet eyes held as he looked down upon her. Right about now, Gilgamesh looked like he was debating with himself if he had to be angry or not.

“ _Two_. It’s two,” he hissed and then pursed his lips. “And you don’t even sound the slightest bit apologetic for this offense. Now, I do wonder where that puts you in…”

Offense.

It took Hakuno some moments of considering what was said before she sweatdropped.

Ah, King of Caprice; he was pissed because she had interrupted his oh so beautiful sleep -not on purpose, mind you? She definitely didn’t want to hear this from the same arrogant, selfish man who hogged the sheets and _more often than not_ shoved her off the bed when he wasn’t clinging to her like some kind of boa constrictor. 

_Jerk._

She narrowed her eyes back at him, a frown set firmly on her face. Exhaustion and stress rendered her without a wording filter, so words came out in a sudden impulse of sincerity, slipping out of her mouth before she could even think about them -if they sounded polite enough for his tastes.

“I-I… Well, I mean, _sorry_? I can’t believe you’re really going to give me a rant because _I’m insomniac_. I’m sorry that the fact that I can’t sleep for four consecutive hours takes you away from your precious naps.”

But rather than appearing offended, which Hakuno halfway expected, Gilgamesh smirked again, revealing bright, even teeth.

“Idiot. If I let myself be jeopardized by mere figments of my Master’s imagination, I’d be the greatest fool in this room.” he coos sarcastically, his forehead now resting against hers. He looked slightly amused by their situation, faint traces of mirth making themselves manifest in his eyes even when he had been scowling down at her mere moments ago. Another one of those contradictions of his.

She’s a little bit amazed at how much she still doesn’t know about him.

Regardless of how fickle she thought his emotions were sometimes, she quickly made up her mind and conjured a reply -unsatisfactory and only meant to chase his attention away from her own unsavory thoughts, but a reply nonetheless.

“I'm - look, I'm sorry, never mind, I just had a strange dream that I didn’t really get and I am really out of it,” she laughed quietly, a laugh that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Sorry it had to wake you up, too.” Hakuno added quickly, wishing her simple answer would be enough so that she wouldn’t be questioned further.

That seemed to relax him a little, even the pressure of his hands on her temples was put to a decreasing stop until they were removed altogether, an unusual thing to do for the Golden King once his mind was settled on something, but his eyes still gleamed with a lingering emotion in the darkness, and she could almost hear him think ‘ _ah, not so fast’_.

He let his fingers thread through her brown, wavy locks and Hakuno had to stifle a faint intake of breath when that hand rested against her cheek. “Is that truly so? White lies will not gain you any favor of mine, Master, and now I desire to know what that place in your dreams is, since it just so happens that I find myself there. You rose me up calling out my name, after all… it seems only fitting to know.”

Hakuno’s body shivered slightly and she wasn't sure if that was due to the conversation or his touch.

“…Uh… Did I?” was her not so eloquent question to his own. At least he didn’t seem bothered that his question was addressed with another.

Perhaps it was the conversation. Gil usually never tried to intervene when she was deep in unpleasant thoughts and recollections of her own unless strictly necessary, and on the rare occasions that he did it was never too noticeable. She knew that he better preferred her to sort her stuff on her own, which was sort of… heart-warming, in a way; even if it was a by-product of his own pride, for her it also meant that he knew she had the ability to stand on her own, that he did not expect her to wait to be rescued.

So now, having him being this insistent, was a bit of a… shock? Is this one of his ‘satisfy my curiosity’ whims?

“That you did.”

Hmm.

She did call out a name while she slept. Was it his?

Hakuno cringed.

“Oh.” Was all she could muster for the time being.

Oh indeed.

She knew full well that she was a shit liar, but she had to change the subject of whatever this night chat time was turning out to be before it got depressing and then turned into a lecture on how she shouldn’t be as _foolishly conceitful_ -as per Gil’s words- so as to attempt to reach for things that are not meant to be dwelled on. After all, why dwell on figments of her time on the Moon Cell or on someone’s half-remembered past when Gilgamesh, who earnestly believed his presence alone was radiant enough that nothing else around mattered regardless of how pressing an issue may be, was there beside her?

Ah, but what to say?

At her silence, he raised an eyebrow at her.

“Well?”

“…Ah- well, I guess it was… a spur of the moment thing?” she said sheepishly, not desiring for the conversation to go further than that.

He narrowed his eyes at her.

She wouldn’t be so lucky.

“ _Hakuno_.”

She sighed. “…Fine. I saw a burning skyline again, and… somehow… I know you’re there. It’s… faint, but I have the feeling you’re there, so I know you can…help me.” Hakuno looked away, a strange warmth tingling on her cheeks. "I know; it's stupid."

Stupid or not, at the very least, that seemed to be an acceptable enough response for his standards if his contemplative stare was anything to go by.

A few seconds of silence went by until she could hear a soft _hmph_ in response.

“I seem to recall telling you I wouldn’t be pleased if you showed me something unpleasant again. Can you say your imprisonment is not still ongoing if you continue to allow your mind to divagate on superfluous matters again?”

Hakuno furrowed her brows and wriggled around, or tried to but Gilgamesh's weight as he straddled her didn't let her.

“It’s not that simple,” she insisted to her Servant because _it really wasn’t that simple_ , but Gilgamesh would have none of it.

“Halt. If this is all there is to it, I’m not allowing this to further aggravate me. Or you, for that matter. Unless you mean to tell me I have overestimated your endurance. Can a figment of a foolish night delusion upset _you_ so?”

“It’s nothing like that-!”

Her rebuke was stopped short.

“-Is it not?”

…Wasn’t it?

It… _It did upset her so_ , she thinks sullenly, scowling at the thought.

Sensing that he had been proven right once more, his signature smirk was back in place as if it had never left in the first place. He looked positively pleased, and she cursed that she was so easy to read.

She sighed.

“That’s easy to say and all, but… what I saw-” she went to refute him, still slightly distraught over it, but before she could a finger trailed down over her lips and hushed her to silence.

“-Is a delusion that matters not,” Gilgamesh finished her sentence for her, his voice carrying a finality that allowed no rebuttals without facing consequences. 

Seemingly having grown tired of that line of conversation, and positive that he had made his previous point across, the blond rolled over, untangling himself from her. She turned herself over as well only to see him make a motion with his hand that Hakuno idly thought that looked as if he were telling her to scoot up closer, but he said nothing, staring at her with tired, half-lidded eyes. 

Was he…?

…Was this, dare she say it, his own particular way of comforting her? Now that was a rare show of consideration coming from Gilgamesh that she didn’t expect to see this late at night. She was almost tempted to rest a hand on his forehead and make sure he didn't have a fever, but then again that would probably offend him in some way or another.

“Come now, Hakuno; I have lost enough rest over this foolish delusion of yours, and so have you. I shall lose no more.”

 _But it felt_ _so real_ , she wanted to say. She was about to refute him again, but then she decided not to at the last second, thinking that it would take more energy than it was worth the effort.

After that, a thick silence engulfed them in some sort of mutual, unvoiced agreement that neither of them wanted to break.

_A sad dream._

Yes, that’s what it all was -it was a sad, strange dream, but the details of that dream had disappeared like foam already, to a remote place inside the deepest parts of her mind where she cannot reach. Still, a strange remaining sense of sadness clung to her heart like an undesirable pest, a sadness that was hard to pinpoint, but why was it sad? Why was it so… _lonely_ …?

A dream within a dream.

A dream that feels not like a dream.

A dream that was sad like a nightmare.

It was… It was… as if being left by everyone, and at the same time it felt like she was watching someone else's life on an old movie screen, shattered fragments of a long-forgotten memory, each piece a reflection of a faint remembrance.

Faintly, she thought; if that world she saw in her dream was in fact reality, wouldn’t that make it the world she naturally belongs to? Would this be the dream, then?

The feeling sank into her heart, deeper and deeper.

Hakuno wrapped her arms around him and commanded those unpleasant thoughts to sink deeper into breathless oblivion. The warmth of him was strangely familiar. It stirred some faint remembrance in Hakuno, of a time that might never have existed, that might as well only exist in her mind -a make-believe memory to comfort herself in the dark.

She saw him close his eyes ever so slowly as well, the rise and fall of his chest against hers relaxing just slightly enough for her to notice that just as quickly as he had been ready to chew her up for keeping him awake and deny him his _precious naps_ , he was starting to fall back asleep again.

Hakuno smiled in a sort of sad, self-pitying way.

Sleep, when it does arrive, is uneasy. She can't shake the feeling that there's something honestly wrong.

But time cannot be turned back and the past couldn’t be returned to.

Because things that were lost couldn’t be brought back.

Hakuno curls tight around him that night, and doesn’t let go until morning.

* * *

_“A few more days of this and I can finally kiss this city goodbye.”_

She remembers she said those words just a few months ago, and now she can only scoff at the thought of them.

Rin Tohsaka opened the sliding door and stepped out of the helicopter, the sudden rush of wind stirring her clothes around. Although she was far too short to be in any sort of danger from the spinning blades, her first instinct was that of ducking under. She stepped onto the landing pad, looking around while the helicopter lifted back into the air, as though the pilot had little intention of overstaying their visit.

Looking around, she took in the view of the mountains that enclosed the facility, noting that it was reasonably secluded, surrounded by nothing but hills and deep forests. It was an ominous scenery to be sure, and now Rin wished that she had been given some more specific information other than some hurried call at about 12 A.M.

_“I’m not joking around,” that woman had snapped at her. “This is serious. Drop whatever you’re doing and get over here! There is something we must discuss and it has to be now!”_

She had tried to prepare herself for the situation awaiting her once the helicopter dropped her on the lab, but although her new employer, that rouge neuroscientist by the name of Hisoka Haibara, spared no expense to bring her there, she was also extremely lip-tight about anything concerning their shared investigation -waking up Kishinami Hakuno, a nameless patient from a long-lost world. Not without reason, though -considering how monitored their every step was by the Western Conglomerate, it was only natural to keep things as quiet as possible, which had also included the deciphering of the coordinates she had gained from the Hakuno she had met on the Moon Cell. It took them months to get the exact location of Hakuno’s last message to her: the treasure map to her resting place. As miraculous as it was, she’d been put to sleep along with a brother she had in a long-abandoned hospital in a Japanese city that lost its name a long time ago, and just a few days away from Haibara's lab -and now Rin’s temporary base of sorts.

But still… something about this midnight call had unsettled Rin so. She wasn’t sure what made it so disturbing, if the woman’s insistence, the background cries that she could hear as she spoke to her, or the slight discordant note in her voice as she told her to hurry up and come over. When earlier that day she had been told they managed to wake that idiot up, she had been… glad, so very glad.

She didn’t expect things to turn… like this. That woman did not go into details as to why she was calling her to come over in such a hurry, but Rin could already guess that something halfway terrible has happened.

There was something life had always tried to teach her: that the better things look like turning up, the stronger the slap on the face. It usually never failed; whenever she thought things were finally going their way, something had to happen to fuck it all up. 

However, she would have never thought the slap would have been this hard.

And things were going their way just fine, didn’t they? She didn’t expect all of it to crumble down so fast, truly, even if the aftermath of the final Holy Grail War in the Moon left a bittersweet taste in her mouth.

The Moon Cell network had collapsed and the automaton regained its original status as observer of mankind. For how long this position would hold, no one aware of its existence knew. While this meant they could no longer use it against the Harweys the way she intended to, it did come with its nice things, even with International Agreement 404 still enforced.

Well.

She supposed that, in a way, a part of her wish had been granted when the automaton shut down, all because of the path that that girl chose; because as per the Moon’s Champion, the ‘Holy Grail’ had been sealed away and put to sleep.

Hakuno Kishinami, the hopeless idiot girl who stubbornly kept moving forward and faced deletion for a wish she wouldn’t even be able to see. Rin tried not to delve much in that thought, lest she gets stupidly sentimental again over someone she would never see again, human counterpart or not.

As Rin moved closer to the reception area of the Heliport, she found a middle-aged woman standing there impatiently, arms crossed.

“I’d better be getting overtime for this,” she told the woman as she approached her, flipping her hair over her shoulder in a flippant way.

The woman scoffed at her, motioning Rin to follow her and guiding her inside the facilities and away from the reception area of the heliport.

“Working late is part of your line of work, Tohsaka,” the other said, sounding reasonably calm despite her early anger when she had called her and the impatience that was still present in her gait and that Rin could notice as she tailed behind her.

As they walked down the path to the labs, the woman did not introduce herself, although she did not need to. Rin already knew her; she had been careful to research her background before getting into contact with her. There were few people that she could trust, especially considering how fickle about their loyalties scientists were, but the woman seemed semi-respectable in that sense and had long since ditched her work under the European Conglomerate, dedicating her research to vaccine development under the Resistance instead. The blonde glanced sideways at Hisoka and tried to guess the woman’s age. Forty, perhaps? Fifty-five? Despite her careful countenance, there was something in her eyes that spoke of something older than any of them, an air of detachedness clinging onto her that one wouldn’t attain by simply doing basic scientific work.

“Okay, spit it out already. What happened? I’m not expecting to be here for some retcon work, am I right?”

Hisoka looked behind her, a sullen look upon her tired features.

“We don’t have time for small talk,” the woman said. “Someone broke into the stasis chambers, Tohsaka. Don't ask me how -we lost contact with the security there at about eleven before I called, and then the crew that I sent over there at twelve reported the stasis chamber was without a pod. I'll spare you the details of their other findings; we have been stolen.”

…

 _What_?

At that, Rin stopped dead in her tracks, jaw almost hitting the floor. “…Stolen,” she started, completely baffled. Hisoka, noticing the lack of a second pair of stiletto heels hitting the tiled floor of the hallway, turned around and grabbed Rin’s arm to pull her forward and get her walking again, which seemed to work just perfectly in making the blond regain her focus again.

“S-Stolen?! Why didn’t you tell me this as soon as I got here?! How did they do it anyway and why go through all that trouble?” she asked urgently.

That was something Rin couldn’t get. Who would want a comatose patient from a lost era in the first place? Did the people who stole them away _even know_ of their identity?

It was so much bullshit.

“We’re getting into that. We patched in the cameras from that floor for any visual of the rest of the intruders; over half of them were blacked out. Traffickers. Fortunately they were only successful in stealing one pod. They must have seen us during the extraction process. Not sure how, but it happened.”

“…Which one?” Rin sputtered.

“Her brother's. We were able to secure Hakuno instead, although not without difficulties, mind you. As for the time being? She’s swimming in benzodiazepine. We were left with no choice but to sedate her.”

She didn’t like the sound of that.

“…Why?”

A reluctant sigh, “It’s best if I show you instead.”

She _definitely_ didn’t like the sound of that.

Haibara's laboratory complex was nothing out of the ordinary. The hallways were spotless white and the scientists Rin passed in the halls all wore white gowns and white slippers over their shoes to match. It was a little bit off-putting but it was all Rin expected from a place like that; a sterile, white-washed place stinking of disinfectant and brimming with uptight idiots who believed that some glorified Master Degree somehow made them smarter.

As much as she disliked the place and more specifically the kind of people it was filled with, she reminded herself it was a necessary evil. Without Hisoka’s research and state of the art technology, waking Hakuno -or what little was left from that girl, anyway- from her coma would have been impossible. Rin didn’t know who her sponsor was and was actually a little bit curious at that -considering that most of the world’s fortune was controlled by the European Conglomerate, Hisoka was _very well_ financed-, but damn if it wasn’t convenient. It was one of the many reasons she decided to rely on her in the first place.

At the end of the long, white hallway was a set of double doors with bold warning labels all over them. The blonde stared at the doors, blue eyes going a little wide as anxiety settled in. It was hard to explain, but there was an oppressive atmosphere that seemed to come from inside the doors that Rin could feel. All this spoke of a bad omen, but the blonde knew she couldn’t abandon ship just yet.

No, she wouldn’t.

The doors opened after the woman inputted some sort of code that she couldn't see as she stood behind her. There was a small beeping sound after the device the woman inputted the code into verified their access, and with the doors opened Rin followed the black-haired woman into the room, finding it to be smaller than she had expected. It was a monitoring room with a reinforced glass. The room beyond the glass was completely white and brightly lit. To the left was a row of computer monitors, and to the right…

Rin let out a breath, her heart racing in sudden panic. “What… is that?”

…Was Hakuno -or at least, the girl who had been Hakuno once, 36 years ago before she was put into cryostasis due to a strange, incurable disease. All around her were several machines connected to her, the monotonic beeping that kept on repeating almost sounding like a tolling bell to the witching hour. She couldn’t see properly from the safety distance that standing behind the reinforced glass offered, but she could still see the red markings that were upon the flesh of her hand.

“You mean those on her hand? Command seals, of course. That girl, Miss Tohsaka, has summoned something," if Rin didn't know any better, she would have sworn there was a slight note of disdain in her tone. "We haven’t still figured out what, exactly; mana deprivation seems not to allow whatever it is that she has summoned to manifest, but we are already working on that as we speak.”

Rin walked forward to get a better look until her face was an inch from the glass, eyes ablaze with a mixture of wonder and barely disguised horror.

“So tell me your thoughts.” Hisoka said from behind her, her voice sounding far away for some reason. “You are the mage in this room. For all intents and purposes, such a thing is a violation of our world’s rules, isn’t it? That is what you told me back then, when we discussed about the aftermath of that Holy Grail War on the moon and this girl’s involvement in it.”

Rin bit her lip, thinking.

It didn’t make sense.

“I… I'm not sure,” Rin confessed, placing a hand against the reinforced glass before her. “If our world’s mana is insufficient enough so as not to allow for traditional magecraft anymore, then… What does this mean? There has to be an alternative explanation. Perhaps we’re not seeing the whole picture.” The blonde said, still trying to overcome her initial shock.

Rin heard the woman sigh, the sound of her shoes terribly loud as she approached.

“Perhaps we’re not, but whatever the case, the fact still stands that she has contracted something and we better find a way to undo this. Now though, I’m not as concerned as to why this happened, that would be your call; since I am not a mage, the details as to how this was made possible escape my interest. I’m rather more concerned about its immediate consequences, and even more concerned about whatever will befall us and both this child and her missing twin.”

“Under normal circumstances, though… Something like this would bring about the summoning of a Grail.”

“And do you think this is the case, then?”

Rin looked from Hisoka back to the secluded room Hakuno was locked in, then back at Hisoka, frowning. There were many possibilities running through her head, but none of them seemed plausible at the moment with what little they knew about the situation at hand in the first place. All they have for now is a sedated, comatose girl with command seals -an event that shouldn’t have happened- and a robbery. It was not enough to form any sensible theories.

Rin thought the stealing and the command seals on Hakuno-lookalike’s hand had to be somehow connected, but she had nothing conclusive about it. It was merely a hunch, but if it proved right, a pair of command seals would be the last of their concerns then.

For the time being, then, she decided to keep the details of her hunch to herself.

“If it is, then there’s something terribly wrong going on here. The whole reason we hijacked into the Moon Cell was because there was not enough mana to support a Grail War on Earth. It’s the whole reason technical mages exist and why we use codecasts instead. I honestly don’t get it. Do you know if he also had those? You know, before he got… snitched.”

The woman shook her head.

“Not that we know. We already had our hands full with wakening her first, we didn’t get to free him from his own pod.”

That wasn’t very helpful.

The blonde gave one last lingering glance at the girl on the bed, gaze contemplative.

Rin knew that the girl who was lying dormant beyond the reinforced glass was not the Hakuno she met, that she was not her friend but somebody else entirely who just so happened to share her looks, but still, seeing someone who looked so much like her in such a state of being froze her blood to ice. Nonetheless, Rin pushed any fears she may have had then away, keeping her expression carefully neutral despite the slight feeling that there was some piece of information purposely withheld from her and that this, whatever it was, was a disaster waiting to happen.

“It’s only a guess, but I think our scurrying little thieves were onto something. Do you have any leads so as to who broke in, at least?”

At that, the woman nodded solemnly.

“We have a trespasser in custody at sector three. Security is already undergoing an interrogation.”

Rin turned quickly and shot back, “Tell me all about it _now_.”

“For the time being, and as I already informed you, all we know is that they are some kind of traffickers and most likely operate around the Ground Zero of Shinjuku, but we don’t have an exact location to give you just yet. Now, I probably don’t even have to tell you this,” Hisoka said, “you already proved yourself when you managed to find their pods still intact, so I expect that you won’t disappoint me with this. I don’t care how you do it, Tohsaka; I want the boy back.”

“Of course I won’t,” she said casually, puffing up her chest in a gesture meant to look confident. “Although I can’t really vouch for the rest of the simpletons that wander around here, you can rest assured I won’t fail.”

She wasn’t sure… if she could still be on time. Given their affliction and what little is known about it with the Western Conglomerate hoarding all that information…

But still… Rin just had to _try_ for that idiot's sake. If they could not save the Hakuno Kishinami that was born from the moon, then _she_ would save the Hakuno that remained on Earth. The moment Rin had awakened with her real human body back on Earth she had made up her mind on that.

She supposed she owed the idiot that much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this ended up being longer than I anticipated. I'm sorry that these first chapters feel so uneventful; I'm trying to do some world building and some relationship building first.  
> On another note, even though I already have the draft for the next chapter, I'm not sure when the next update will be; I have this and some other plot bunnies I want to finish and post as well, but my plant is filling again with new positives and I'm a liiittle bit close to have a nervous breakdown. Pls stay safe y'all.


	3. Chapter II: Whiteout

_She woke up in a deep, profound darkness, buffeted by voices that sounded rather indistinct._

_That she ‘woke up’ was only an impression, but if she was not awake, then what was this? Where was she?_

_There was a fogginess in her mind that was slowly but surely melting away, her thoughts becoming sharper and more focused, and a faint sense of recognition flared within her as the voices started to become somewhat decipherable. However, she couldn’t make anything out in the inky blackness of her world. Her eyelids refused to work, as if they had been stuck together with some sort of very powerful adhering substance._

_She tried to twist around in an attempt to bring her surroundings into focus by relying on her sense of touch, although if she had to be honest with herself, she already knew that her efforts would be for naught. She writhed beneath some kind of thick layer that was constricting her, kicking her feet ineffectually, but her body felt heavy and she accomplished nothing at all._

_But why?_

‘It feels like this body isn't mine at all.’

_However, the voices might know why, won’t they?_

_She tried to ask them, tried to raise her voice to speak, but again, nothing came out of her efforts._

‘Wrong. This is all wrong.’

_Again, she felt as if she were watching a scenery through a broken recording in which only sound remained. However, maybe if she listens to it intently enough, even if she cannot move nor see, she can bring something useful into focus._

_There was a soft click of approaching footsteps, and then there was the resounding sound of a conversation somewhere nearby._

_The exchange between the two was light. At the very least, that was what it appeared. Then again, she only had sound as her only guide, so she might have interpreted the whole exchange between the two wrong._

_A tired, sleepy sounding voice and a commanding, and just equally tired voice. They were so different yet so alike it was almost comical._

_Like ripples, the voices went far and came close._

_“…And how about you let me go back to sleep? It is clear that we shall not be advancing anymore anytime soon.”_

_“Perhaps, but I see a problem with that reasoning; you’re of no use to me with your eyes closed.”_

_“…The human brain can go without sleep for thirty-six hours before signs of cognitive impairment start showing. It has been almost three days.”_

_The other huffed._

_“So? I reiterate: all of it, all of this, and yes,_ you too _, are meaningless in the face of ______.”_

_She could tell that the other sighed at that, but she wasn’t sure if they were annoyed or simply tired, or even a mix of both._

_“So can I expect something other than half-assed attempts, or have I misjudged your character?”_

_Was there a hint of irritation that she thought she sensed in the voice, or was it merely impatience? She did not choose to further ponder on that. In the absence of sight, there was nothing to be gained in doing so._

_“You can rest assured on that. I take pride in my work,” the voice said. There was a hint of satisfaction in it, the kind of satisfaction that came from doing something well and being well aware of it, but no warmth whatsoever._

_The other voice hummed._

_“Then tell me about your findings.”_

_“In detail?”_

_“An outline, if you prefer; do we know who’s the scurrying scoundrel hiding behind those?”_

_The voice then took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. The noxious smell of nicotine hanged in the air._

_“Not yet, but I shall get to that soon.”_

_The voice hummed, but elaborated no further than that._

_“—As for the rest. We’ve tried _______; nonetheless, seems still deep in coma,” it said, blowing out smoke. “And as for _____, there should be no more loose ends. However-”_

_That voice took another slight breath again, and it was clear by the sudden hesitation that they were being careful to form the next word with precision._

_“-even with that, there still might not be anything that can be done.”_

_Tranquility vanished, and suddenly there was a definite heaviness in the ambience, as if any wrong word would make the other suck the entire oxygen of the room by sheer force of will._

_The other voice rebuked readily, as if prepared for such a line of thought._

_“Spare me that nonsense,” they said. “If you are as talented as your files indicate, and as ambitious as you claim, you will find a way. Or am I to take your words as nothing but empty chatter?”_

_“No empty chatter; despite what you may think, controlling _____ at this stage is not nearly as simple; it has been roughly... what? Thirty years? The more time you let pass, the more that human body of yours will-”_

_The next thing the other voice said was clearly an evasion._

_“Mind your voice. You will wake her up.”_

Wake ‘her’ up?

_Her thoughts were caught by that word._

_The conversation stopped then, lost in the swirling darkness, the silence that ensued after only interrupted by a faint repetitive sound, so low she could barely hear it at first._

_It was in the distant background, sounding far away._

_She strained to identify the sound. It was like a low, beeping noise._

_Then, the darkness began to swirl._

_Little by little, she became aware of ‘herself’._

_I’m- I’m-!_

“…Mongrel, are you planning on just loitering there for the ages, or are you ever going to get around and do something?” His tone was intense and no-nonsense as it always was. “I was promised entertainment, Hakuno, and you can hardly provide any if your eyes are closed.”

Something was shaking her rather unceremoniously, the insistence of it all making her feel a slight pang of motion sickness.

Hakuno’s awakening was no gentler than her usual dreams of falling.

Bleary brown eyes opened, blinking a few times to adjust to the sudden burst of light.

It all melted away in an instant; the blackness, the smell of bleach and hand sanitizer being tarnished by that of nicotine, the voices, those figments of a conversation taking place somewhere out of reach, that nagging and ever-present sense of déjà vu— it all vanished in a flash of the whitest of whites, scattered like the petals of a delicate flower caught in strong winds, as if none had ever come to pass.

As the world came back into focus, she took notice that she was still leaning against the copilot’s seat as a familiar face hovered above hers, knowing of no boundaries and no restraints. She knew every pore and every crease in it, and she would recognize the owner of those snake-like eyes anywhere, without the slightest bit of hesitation.

Hakuno woke up to Gilgamesh not ever once ceasing to be the most annoying thing Hakuno has ever had the displeasure of being bitched at by.

Her expression was one of resigned amusement as she looked back at him. She shook her head a couple of times before answering, voice still thick with sleep.

“You know,” Hakuno started, rubbing at her eyes, “you could always ask more delicately.”

Why was he being so pushy, anyway? It wasn’t like she had anything better to do, and nowhere in their immaterial contract as Master and Servant said that she was supposed to be the court’s buffoon 24/7. A measureless amount of time had passed since they had taken off with Vimana and had sailed off somewhere else to settle down for who knows how long this time, and in the time since, things had been remarkably uneventful, enough so that even Hakuno had the time to fall into a deep sleep as Gilgamesh took the reins of his ship.

And by the looks of it, judging how Gilgamesh had set the ship on autopilot mode and decided to amuse himself with some other pleasantries as he waited for the radar to pick on something, he had thought exactly the same.

Okay, sure, she’s been having a ridiculous amount of sleep as of late, but this time around she _wanted_ that nap; there had been nothing else to do other than doze off and wait to stumble across something, so really, he had no fucking excuse to nag at her for sleeping those idle hours away.

“It is faster this way,” Gilgamesh all but purred as he made his way back to the pilot’s seat, and the carelessness in his tone was not lost on Hakuno.

She knew she shouldn’t let this bother her -Gods knew she was used to it by now-, but that didn’t make this any less annoying.

“Incidentally, there is something I meant to show you that I am certain you shall find more interesting than drooling over some transient dream of times long past.”

Hakuno made a chocked noise as she rubbed her chin self-consciously, trying not to fall for the aggravating noise that was her servant’s rumbling laughter as he watched her distress over her state of being as she finally came back to her senses -now completely awake, if she wasn’t before.

"Yeah yeah, rub it in why don't you," she mumbled dejectedly as her eyes turned to scan the controls of the ship instead, wondering what was so interesting that her servant saw himself in need to wake her up so insistently.

All the while, she tried not to pay any mind to Gilgamesh’s condescending laughter in the background.

Infront of her, in the navigation console, a single flashing amber telltale called out, and Hakuno made a quick check of the readouts as a three-dimensional image sprang to life and expanded in front of them, bright and colorful as it showcased the outlying sector of the cosmos in which they found themselves floating.

Surprisingly, everything was normal; there were no extreme equatorial or polar gravitational distortions, it had liquid water as well as land.

Well, apparently, they had found _something_ worthwhile at long last, and by what she could see from the radar’s readings, they had run across a suitable planet about half an hour ago.

Gilgamesh, who was now lying on his back on the pilot’s seat, was tinkering with the projection to further refine the available data. When it was finally to his liking, he nudged a control and the holographic image instantly zoomed in on a single star, flanked by three other planets.

“A main sequence star,” he told her, and Hakuno knew he was itching for giving her a thirty-minute long exposition on it just by the sound of his voice, that slight discordant note of joy that betrayed his mock indifference. “At it might seem, this radar is more than slightly suitable. The engineers who committed themselves to building such a stirring artifact are to be commended. As is the fool who indulged herself into acquiring such.”

As he said that, pride seemed to seep through every pore of him. Pride for the lifeforms who to build the technology of the control panel, pride at himself for getting his hands on it, or pride at her for suggesting they did, she wasn’t sure. Gilgamesh simply loved when things went to his favor, regardless of how it came to pass.

She lifted her gaze from the console, scratching the back of her head at the gratuitous praise, the fact that Gilgamesh didn’t have a habit of giving them so lightly making it all the more disconcerting.

“Lucky me; I wasn’t aware you were now giving praises so easily,” she told him with a wry smile. 

Gilgamesh harrumphed.

“Nothing like such; upon further reflection I have decided to bestow upon you the benefit of approval despite your many shortfalls, a brief reprieve, so do not be under the impression that I am giving them for free and act like you are more grateful for them,” he said in one of those strangely characteristic rapid speeches of his, almost sounding indistinct.

She made a face at him. 

“Don’t tell me, this is going to make it to that debt tab of yours, isn’t it?” Hakuno sweatdropped.

That earned her a snort.

It most probably would.

Hakuno dropped the topic at hand, focusing instead on the scenery that lay beyond the protective glass of the ship as they lapsed into silence once more -an endless sweep of stars and nebulae, glorious and overpowering; a scenery so vast it was marveling and frightening at the same time.

With only the two of them to witness their beauty, distant stars of which ancient man had been long ignorant gleamed in the interstellar night. It is a pity, Hakuno thought vaguely, that nobody else would come to see any of that with what the state of things back on Earth, although at the same time there was a small, barely there, sense of satisfaction that they were most probably the first to ever witness the cruel beauty that was in the vast impersonal emptiness of interstellar space.

However, cosmic beauty notwithstanding, the fact still stood that there was a planet Gil most definitely wanted them to check, and since it had been the first thing whose atmosphere was composed of 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen that they had seen for a long time, they were practically obligated to check it out. Besides, a chance to breathe unrecycled air didn’t sound so bad to Hakuno.

Perhaps in the vast wilderness of that planet, she could have a small break from Gilgamesh’s nagging.

However, as Vimana slowed upon entering the planet’s system, a thought struck her.

“Is it… actually safe to land?” she murmured.

Stupid question, she knew, but it would never hurt to check.

The blond made a non-committal sound as his gaze lingered over the readouts. “I believe so,” he said smoothly. “There seems to be a raging thundercloud storm below, however,” and then he made a harrumphed noise. “Well, let it be; I cannot allow mere forces of nature be a deterrent. That would be regrettable.”

“Lucky me indeed,” the brunette said before sighing as Vimana slipped into orbit, giving the two of them a better glimpse at said storm, and suffice to say, it was massive: there was continuous lightning, making it seem like almost the entire atmosphere was shaking with it. The roaring storm reminded Hakuno more of a gas giant’s atmosphere than anything resembling Earth’s, minus the crushing gravity and deadly radiation, of course -attempting to enter the atmosphere of a gas giant would most probably put an unsavory end to their quote unquote colonization expedition across the sea of stars.

With a little amount of luck, they probably wouldn’t have to deal with enraging local fauna; an unpleasant landing was better than getting chased by extraterrestrial death traps regardless of how amusing Gilgamesh, ever the adrenaline junkie, found them to be -and the blond seemed to have a _natural_ talent to enrage things that he ought not. If it wasn’t so exasperating, she would find it funny.

“Hoh? What is with that face just now, mongrel? Do not tell me that thundercloud frights you so,” she didn’t have to turn to look at him to know he had a shit-eating grin on his face. “It is only atmosphere, Master,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. There’s nothing solid to hit.”

Hakuno grumbled dejectedly, but did not contradict him.

Gilgamesh only gave her a knowing grin at her lack of response, and Hakuno immediately got the feeling that the blond was silently mocking her for being insincere with herself, because _of course_ the thought of violent turbulences made her uneasy -even if she didn’t have a human body, she _was modeled after one_. It was a fucking normal response.

Vimana accelerated toward the angry atmosphere below as she prepared herself for an unpleasant entry.

* * *

After surpassing the main storm layer and overcoming the nauseating, terrific turbulences that came with penetrating atmosphere, Hakuno got an even better glimpse at the planet’s surface as they prepared for landing; it had mountains whose tops were obscured by low-hanging clouds, dense forests enveloped in fog, deep valleys, rivers, and numerous lakes of every shape and size scattered throughout the land.

Relieved to be safe from that terrible storm, and even more glad to be back on solid ground despite the fact that the sky above them still looked gray and bleak, Hakuno was more than a little eager to disembark, and bearing in mind the climate, she changed into a warm gray long coat with a thick, black turtleneck underneath and matching heavy boots that were far more suited for climbing. Gilgamesh mimicked her own choice for warmer clothes, even when he didn’t seem as affected by the cold as she was.

However, the chill in her bones had little to do with temperature, she soon found out.

There was a definite lack of something there, she just didn’t know what it was for certain, but she could feel it in the air. Or rather, she could feel its _absence_ in the air, and she pondered on it as she followed Gilgamesh out of the ship.

Where they got off, there was nothing. Or at least, nothing ‘modern’. There was only but a solitary forest at the top of the mountainside, and enough cloud cover to mute the daylight. Although it wasn’t dark, it was not exactly a cheery scenery, either, and it was hard to make things out in the distance with that thick fog covering the mountains’ zenith. The lands were a far cry from everything Gilgamesh stood for and had shown her for the time they had been sailing the stars together, but this wasn’t what was bothering her.

The planet was nothing like Gilgamesh’s first chosen -instead of the city of golden, extravagant skyscrapers befitting of the king’s excessive tastes, this place had nothing but endless plains and cold tundra. All very well and pretty in its wild rawness, but… yet still, there was something Hakuno couldn’t shake the feeling of that it wasn’t right.

"Not that the idea of an expedition sounds unappealing," Hakuno murmured as she rubbed her arms in a poor attempt to keep body temperature, “I mean, it never does and it kind of brings back memories of the labyrinths, in a way, but… do you _really_ think there's anything of worth to find here? This does look… well, kind of abandoned."

And muted. Although it was far from being gloomy, their surroundings were just—gray.

He chuckled, apparently amused at her recalcitrance.

“It is not so much that there should be something of worth to find, and more the fact that we shall be the pioneers to find it, should there be any.”

Of course, he always had to be the first at everything. In a way, it made sense, but...

Her gaze traveled up the soaring mountainside as she considered his words.

The whole place reminded her of images that she has seen on the Moon Cell’s data logs on Earth. The mountains gave the scenery an imposing aura. It was quite beautiful, really—and also very much quiet. The only sounds that she could hear were those that were made by the slight breeze and the barely perceptible sound of water. There were no animals prancing about, no birds, no nothing. 

Sure, this wasn’t a zoological expedition by any means, and Hakuno didn’t mean for it to be, but it was…

…Quiet.

Too quiet.

Awfully so.

“Why do I have the feeling you’ve just landed us into a death trap?” Hakuno deadpanned.

He shook his head, grinning and undeterred.

“Assuredly, but are not death traps always brimming with effects of worth?”

She really couldn’t see the logic in that, but if the King says so, then it must be truth?

Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Hakuno sighed but said nothing to Gilgamesh’s less than reassuring statement. She simply moved up so that she was walking alongside him and resumed to explore the landscape with the occasional quip thrown her way by her blonde source of headaches.

After climbing a slight slope, they found themselves pushing through a field of some kind of tall grass. Granted, she could not recognize what she was stepping over, but the blond was fast to provide exposition.

“While it is amusing to see that kind of awestruck expression on that foolish face of yours, this is nothing that you should marvel upon,” he said. “This looks like a variation of plain, ordinary, bland cultivated vegetation. Surely edible, but nothing more, nothing less.”

“Okay, that’s great and all,” Hakuno started, “but, I’m assuming that it didn’t get here on its own. So… who planted it?”

Gilgamesh let out a derisive snort.

“That is irrelevant. I have no care for such; conquest is not what I intend to seek form this, and should there be any settlements around, then we should find them soon enough.”

“I just find it hard to believe we have not stumbled across anything deadly as of yet…” she trailed off.

Certainly nothing threatening had manifested itself. Actually, she mused, nothing at all had manifested itself.

At her words, she heard her servant chuckling to himself, the sound of it one that she recognized the undertone of: she could tell that if he hadn’t been amused before, now he was.

“Does my Master itch for a shootout? Is that what this is?”

The smirk that was upon his lips sent a tiny tremor course through her, but she tried to downplay it.

“Well… not exactly that, but... don’t you think playing the pirate becomes pointless without someone to actually commit acts of piracy _against_?” she reasoned, and Hakuno couldn’t really tell why now, of all times, the lack of intelligent life -or of enraged locals screaming bloody murder at them- was bothering her so much when it never did all those other times when they had stumbled upon lands much like this one. Had it perhaps become a habit?

Her servant hummed, folding his arms against his chest as his face changed into something akin to contemplative. However, and much to her dismay, it didn’t take long for that contemplative countenance to morph into something that could only be described as _conniving_ as Gilgamesh reached a conclusion of his own, and it made Hakuno almost regret she even said that.

Shit, she didn’t mean it like _that,_ however Gilgamesh had taken her words for. Hakuno could tell when her servant was itching to get himself into a fight, and this look right about now looked like she had just implanted that idea in his head.

“Wait, _no_ , Gil-”

“If merriment is what my Master seeks, then we must make haste to find such, so much as we are able to in this dire wasteland, won’t we? I must admit, I’d find it upsetting as well if entertainment was once again denied of me.”

The brunette made a small noise of consideration at that if only to let him know she was listening, but preferred not to contradict him, knowing better than to take away the king’s amusement.

While she herself had a habit of overthinking scenarios and ‘what ifs’ to the point of exhaustion, Gilgamesh had an annoying habit of downplaying everything that came their way simply because he didn’t deem it worth his thoughts, too in love with the idea that because he was allegedly the strongest servant anyone could ever hope to summon, there was nothing that should ever dare to oppose him. It went beyond simple recklessness, and it was rearing its head even in the midst of what he himself liked to say was a ‘pleasure trip’ and nothing else, but nonetheless Hakuno appreciated the unintended attempt to ease the tension she was feeling.

However, in the absence of someone to pick up a fight with -running water and scudding clouds didn’t count as targets-, the two continued on through the field, heading for the dense tree line in the distance.

The field eventually gave pass to an evergreen forest that grew denser as they delved deeper within. The tall, thick trees closed in around them, obscuring the gray sky and giving just the slightest feeling of claustrophobia. An increasingly uncomfortable Hakuno found herself looking up into the trees. That strange feeling of uneasiness kept clinging to her even as they kept going forward, and at long last, as they pushed through tall grass, she finally came to the realization of what felt so wrong—

She felt as if she was being watched.

Glancing around, she wondered if Gilgamesh felt the same. Judging from his neutral expression, she was pretty certain that if he did, he wasn’t paying much heed to it, so she couldn’t be all that sure that the sentiment was shared.

As they advanced, the slope they were ascending grew steeper, the terrain more difficult to navigate through, and as their surrounding increasingly became more inhospitable and unforgiving, Hakuno felt the urge to remark yet again on the one thing that had continued to trouble her ever since they set foot on that verdant, lush forest.

“Gil, you hear that?”

Striding along nearby, Gilgamesh gave her a sidelong glance, looking unfazed.

“Mongrel, hear _what_?” he asked rather tetchily.

Hakuno gaped at him, walking past him and then stopping right in front of him, throwing her arms up in exasperated frustration. Hakuno wasn’t prone to emotional outbursts like that, even less of the raging kind; as far as she could remember, which wasn’t quite a lot all things considered, she’s never been. However, she was now sharing a life with Gilgamesh, attention whore extraordinaire, and that brought about many changes in regards to her own mannerisms —so why shouldn’t this be one of them?

“Exactly. Nothing! No birds. No animals. No nothing. How can you have plants without animals? In a place such as this you’d think you’d hear something, even if whatever was making the noise was only trying to get away from us. But it’s just—!”

And as if an answer to a prayer, her frustrated speech was interrupted by a definite sound, one that Hakuno didn’t like it one bit. Unlike Gilgamesh, she was always thinking defensively, and if she already felt wary about the dense forest, she now liked it even less.

Hakuno found solace in the fact that, at the very least, this time around the sentiment was somewhat shared with her servant.

Well, somewhat.

He did seem fazed for a moment, but the moment was quickly shattered, Gilgamesh’s laughter echoed loudly in the ringing silence of the forest, just like his booming voice as he proudly declared:

“Master, do _you_ hear that?” he asked, mocking her own query just earlier. “Isn’t this convenient? We don’t have to go look for leads when the leads come to us so readily!”

He was boasting about it as if it somehow should make her feel at _ease._

Having had enough of ghosts and without much fanfare, Gilgamesh gave two quick strides, positioning himself in front of her as he drew an arm back, and on cue to his silent request, golden ripples made themselves manifest out of thin air all around them, engulfing the area in eerie golden light. He drew one sword from his vault, and the gesture was sufficient to tell her to do likewise, making her move into a better defensive position at his back. Hakuno’s hand passed over the air, and a holo projection appeared, flashing to life exactly where she was standing.

The growl deepened an octave, but now the sound of it was unmistakably close.

Hakuno turned around swiftly, and stared at the patch of forest where she thought she heard the shriek.

The ground shook as another scraping sound filled their ears. She turned around again. It was soon followed by the shaking of trees and violent rustling of leaves, and as if just to remind Hakuno of how utterly nonsensical her life has become, something definitely not animal like nor human like leaped down from the dense cover of conifers, knocking both she and Gilgamesh off their feet, sending them tumbling back. 

While Gilgamesh’s landing more resembled that of a cat as he landed on both his feet, Hakuno’s wasn’t so stellar. She hit the ground with her butt, and with a hiss and a grimace of annoyance, she accepted Gilgamesh’s not so careful handling of her as he grabbed her by the wrist and puller her upwards.

The scenery that was to greet her was mildly disturbing. 

There, hovering directly over them, was a giant beast that looked like someone had sloppily glued together a praying mantis with a worm, with bladed arms and a disgusting drooling maw filled with sharpened teeth.

It looked down at them menacingly once before it screeched loudly at them, the resounding sound knocking off some leaves as it echoed throughout the forest.

Hakuno winced as her face was splattered with sticky saliva. As she brought a hand to clean off the filth, a quick glance at her servant told her he was likewise sprayed and looking as annoyed as he was disgusted.

Well, of course, _of course_ something like that would happen; this world was too accommodating to be so utterly devoid of animal life of any kind. It all made sense now. It was not that there was nothing in sight, there definitely was animal life in there, and who knows what else; it just so happened that they were most probably currently hiding from the thing that was looking down on the two of them with a familiar hunger in those red dots that it had for eyes.

Without so much as a prompt, the beast howled again, throwing its head back as it did, and as if on cue, Hakuno could _definitely_ see more of those same red glowing dots hiding in the distance, in the deeper parts of the forest, behind the shadows of the trees.

So much for not pissing people -or things, in this particular scenario- off for once.

Without much of a second thought and without needing Hakuno to even suggest it, Gilgamesh leapt at it. As he went, he infused a portion of mana into the blade he held, making it glow. The brunette casted a shield for good measure, but she knew he wouldn’t need it that much, especially considering that since he wasn’t wearing his signature flashy armor, Gilgamesh could move faster and more freely so that he wouldn’t need much of her extra precautions.

The first one Gilgamesh simply decapitated with ease, its body falling as it bled and died.

However, the display of skill didn't seem to discourage their attackers, as another leapt out of the woods with the clear intent to feed. Then again, there was nothing that told Hakuno they had the capability to engage in rational decision making; surely, those beasts were acting on pure raw instinct.

As for this other second, a barrage of weapons much resembling one of those bullet hell games Gilgamesh was so fond of was thrown its way, multiple blades plunging into its belly and cutting the flesh cleanly and easily, internal organs spewing out in a mess of blood as it fell to the ground as well.

Again, this was hardly a deterrent for the rest, because at least a dozen more leapt out from the thick forest, looking just as ready to maul at them and then digest them just as their fallen comrades had tried so eagerly.

As her servant prepared to meet their charge, rapidly throwing and switching weapon after weapon, Hakuno’s eyes lingered on the bodies of the fallen beasts, and as she inspected their remains from a comfortable distance, she came to the realization of an uncomfortable fact -well, uncomfortable for her, at least.

The blood, if it could be called such, was a thick black substance whose noxious smell resembled almost that of burning tar, and despite how laughably easy Gilgamesh made it look like, the skin of those beasts looked nothing but soft; it was hard to tell exactly from her distance, but their hide looked extra thick, and their flesh…

Those things… Hakuno had the definite feeling that they were not organic. At least, not completely, even if they were made to look like they were.

It was, they were-

“ _Machines_?”

Hakuno barely had the time to cast a shield when one of those things tried to crash into her. She staggered back a little as the holographic projection of her barrier glowed dimly in the muted darkness of the forest, standing between her and a very angry looking creature.

“You _fool_! Have you completely divorced from your sense of self?” Gilgamesh snarled at her from somewhere she couldn’t quite pinpoint the location of with what the speed at which he was switching from enemy to enemy. “Do you so desperately wish to be digested? Because that's what's about to happen!”

“Geez, don’t you think I _know_ that already?” was her frustrated answer as she continued her ongoing battle with reluctant algorithms and her less than satisfactory grasp at magecraft of the offensive kind, her ‘shock’ codecast not nearly strong enough to cause fatal damage or internal bleeding but still able to send the hideous thing reeling back a few meters away from her. Not that she intended to get in the way of Gilgamesh’s offensive tactics or even try to one-up him in that regard; considering that the blond could more than support himself, if Hakuno attempted to support him with raw power she would only end up being hit by close-quarters friendly fire and nothing good would come out of it.

Gilgamesh then broke eye contact with Hakuno, and instead focused on the snarling creatures that were before him. He charged forward again, sword at the ready.

One beast swiped at him, but he simply twisted his body out of the way and stabbed it with his sword, the hideous thing squealing in pain as it fell with the rest of its fallen comrades, but more and more of those were approaching, their numbers ever increasing. It was complete chaos in the grass, the situation made all the more dangerous because their numbers didn’t seem to end.

Just when Hakuno was about to make the audacious claim that _perhaps_ they should consider retreating -she knew Gilgamesh would hardly listen to that, but sue her; Hakuno was a sucker for hope-, their little pest problem was quite literally solved right in the blink of an eye -and right in front of them.

A sudden burst of bright light coming somewhere overhead put the chaos of battle to a halt. The sheer intensity of it caused her to squint her eyes so that it could not render her completely blind, but then she raised a hand to cover her eyes when merely squinting proved ineffective at shielding herself from the onslaught of vivid light.

The light was followed by a familiar feeling, sickly sweet and overpowering; _mana_ , mana in large quantities, so much of it Hakuno had trouble to keep herself upright at the sudden onslaught, feeling both sick and lightheaded at once.

As Hakuno’s eyes focused on the flare as it ascended up the skies, the uneasiness, the relentless feeling of déjà vu, everything -it finally clicked.

It wasn’t the fact that there were no people to interact with that was so upsetting, not even the ever-present feeling of being stalked by who knows who or what. It was something even far simpler than that.

There was… no magical pressure at all to be felt there.

All the other places they had visited had… mana. Some more, some less, but all of them had an ounce of it enough that even an inexperienced mage like Hakuno could definitely feel it in the atmosphere. This place, on the other hand, had… almost none of that, and it became crystal clear the moment whoever or whatever casted that flare, because all of sudden the ambience became impossibly _thick_ with mana, and it was making her feel _sick._

She tried to locate its source, and in the distance, she thought she saw a cloaked figure standing in the midst of it, but the features of whatever or whoever was there were quite indistinct, although she noted that its proportions resembled that of a human. She wasn’t sure if that should be a relief.

The burst of light was also accompanied by a high-pitched sound, and all of a sudden it began to pulse with energy.

“Haku-”

If Gilgamesh pretended to shield her from that, the reaction frame was a tad too slow; a shockwave expanded outward from that flare of light, achieving maximum intensity and everything was wiped out in a dazzling burst of white.

Momentarily rendered half-deaf and half-blind, Hakuno had no idea what was going on, and could only let herself be swept away by the flow of things. Of one thing, at least, she was certain; the creatures that were before them, momentarily forgetting they even existed, turned tail and fled, heading back into the deeper parts of the forest.

As for the rest of the colony, she wasn’t all that sure what happened to them; all that she knew before being blinded by light was that they had been sucked into the flare, and her sense of hearing wasn’t all that helpful either, as all she could hear were muted gurgling wet noises, as if something was being torn to pieces.

Hakuno’s sense of alarm grew stronger, but she couldn’t quite act accordingly; it felt as if her mind was oddly… anesthetized. She felt incoherent.

Distorted images flickered in her eyes as her sense of sight started to lose its focus and the whole world slowed down.

_You’re going to do something for me._

Not this-

_Don’t worry, I know you won’t let me down._

Shit, not this again…

She wanted to scream, but both her mind and her mouth were full of cotton.

When she tried to steady herself, her servant’s voice sounding strangely echoey in the darkness of that forest and the feeling of his hands around her even more foreign and immaterial, she could only manage to let out a strangled, pained groan as the approaching darkness of unconsciousness sought to pull her under.

Her legs buckled; the muscles suddenly unable to support her weight. Her fingers dug into the fabric of her servant’s clothes as a sudden, strange pang of raw horror took hold of her mind.

And then, just as her body fought for a coherent thought process, Hakuno’s heart stopped beating.

* * *

_Hakuno slept._

_Hakuno dreamed._

_The realm where her deepest thoughts inhabited was being swallowed by an even deeper darkness._

_A tiny voice tried to howl its warning._

You must wake up soon, _whispered someone in the voice of wind and forests, but it oddly echoed in the floating darkness, and was immediately snatched away._

_‘Am I asleep again?’ she could only ask herself._

_It almost felt like dreaming, but there was no_ telling _. There was nothing but the ongoing state of not quite nothingness._

_Of almost being._

_Something traced its way across her lips. The pressure exerted was slight, but enough for her to notice._

_“You’ve felt us,” a voice whispered, sounding both male and female at once, the words echoing in the darkness of her lucid, transient dreaming, “haven’t you?”_

_Soft sensations and phantom touches were all she could feel -the touch of someone else’s burning skin against her own threatening to pull her out of unconsciousness._

_“We have watched you,” the voice -voices?- continued, snapping her focus back to them. “We know you.”_

_There were fingers running smoothly over her sensitive flesh, stirring memories of forbidden pleasures. For a moment she thought she was close to reach some kind of useful conclusion, but the feeling of skin against skin seemed to suck away what little was left of her resolve._

_“What are you?”_

_“Oh, little mage,” the voice said in a deceivingly sweet sound that dripped off their tongue like venom. “Where did you find the strength to ask a question of us?” they urged, hot breath against her neck, and she could feel the definite presence of mana, overwhelming mana, building around her, dancing provocatively over her skin._

_She could feel those words trying to worm their way between her thoughts, making her feeling defiled in a way that mere carnality could never manage._

_There was something nagging at the back of her mind as she trembled beneath those practiced hands. The touches seemed to hint at something darker, a sense of wrongness ever present in that touch._

_“Poor girl. You don’t need to fight us. After all, we only wish for you to open your eyes,” they sweetly whispered._

_She faintly recognized what it was, and an all too familiar fear pressed down on her._

_Old magic stirred all around her; power sang through her body._

“…uno…”

_She was consumed by its cleansing brilliance. As she let herself be swept away by it, there was nothing else that mattered anymore; there was only her and the melody of ancient magic, spreading its wings and soaring with death, giving voice to prayers drenched in blood._

“…ku…no…”

* * *

“Hakuno!” A voice screamed from somewhere close by and, a moment later, she could feel herself being roughly shaken.

Her befuddled mind took notice that she was covered all around in what she could guess were thick clothes. The warmth was overpowering, but not unwelcome. In fact, she tried to curl in more around herself in hopes she could retain more of that wonderful heat.

Surrounded by that constricting warmth, she really didn’t want to wake up.

She was far too tired, and still far too cold to even consider abandoning that cocoon of blessed comfort.

However, the shaking refused to abate and then, suddenly, recognition flared inside her mind as the room, or wherever she was, finally righted itself, and everything came back to focus in blurry slow motion as her eyes opened.

The darkness was replaced with flickering candlelight.

Hakuno stirred groggily, the scenery of darkness that she saw slowly passing into memory. The last touch of old magic disappeared, leaving her with only a dull ache between her thighs as those intrusive, phantom touches became an increasingly distant memory.

Eyes now completely opened, Hakuno looked around only to realize that she was no longer in the deeper darkness of an alien forest, not even back on Vimana, or falling from the vacuum of space, but somewhere else instead. She faintly recognized the smell of humidity mixing with that of smoke, and recognized the place as the deepest part of a cave.

Most certainly not the most opulent of places to stay the night. She had to wonder whyever Gilgamesh decided this was an acceptable place to settle.

Why were they there in the first place, anyway? She did blackout back there, but then... what then?

“…Gil?” she gasped weakly as she fought to make even the smallest of movements.

She was finally making sense of her surroundings, and she didn’t know what to feel about what she’s seeing. Her servant was curled up beside her, which made it terribly difficult not to look back at him, with their coats and cloaks draped over the two them along with some extra pelts that he had surely taken from his vault. A sensible decision to help share body heat for sure, but still…

Her initial shock must have been shared with Gilgamesh at least to some extent, or otherwise she didn’t know what to make of the look he was giving her. Even more odd than that was that there was none of those smug ‘ _I’m letting you off because I’m feeling magnanimous’_ kind of rebukes that he usually threw her way when she did something that he considered unbefitting or undignified, like perhaps falling unconscious like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

At the lack of a quip or even a condescending comment thrown carelessly her way, Hakuno decided to act proactive and shatter the silence ringing around them with another query of her own.

“Where… what is this place?”

While the question might have seen inconsequential -it was quite obvious she was inside a cave underground-, for Hakuno it meant much more than simply knowing her current whereabouts. It was a means to know _why_ they got there in the first place.

She tried to put the pieces of whatever happened before she lost consciousness together, but they eluded her time and time again. There was a gap in her memory, she was sure of it, so she didn’t quite know what to make of everything around her other than something halfway unpleasant happened that forced Gilgamesh to take a detour and take shelter.

Gilgamesh tilted his head, his eyes peering at her seemingly lazily.

“Though the analog is vague, I believe this can act as an underground safe haven of sorts for however that storm lasts, humid and inhospitable though it may be.” He explained, and if she didn’t know any better, the tone would almost make it seem he was treating her like a child, the know it all smile ever present and ever aggravatingly irritating. “What is more, any attempts at getting back in route will have a much better chance of success if first we rest and allow ourselves to recover.”

In the blink of an eye, her Servant’s eyes flashed, and it was all the warning she got before strong hands cupped her chin, forcing her to stare up into his face. The room seemed to fade out of focus until all that remained were Gilgamesh’s red eyes eating up her vision. She tried to focus on something other before the intensity that she found in them could burn her to ashes, but Gilgamesh’s gaze held her almost like it had some sort of controlling power over her.

For a moment, as she tried to steady her breath in the midst of the silence, Hakuno feared that, for once, there was something wrong with him, because the one time she wanted him to say _something,_ he was keeping himself awfully quiet as he studied her features searching for _something_. Hakuno couldn’t quite tell what, though.

There was something in the way his eyes flashed in the dimly-lit space that made her want to go run and hide away. Then again, Gilgamesh’s slitted pupils always gave her that sort of feeling.

When Hakuno blinked, tears began to trickle down her cheeks, her eyes still sensitive from that radiant spell from before.

“Gil, what’s wrong?” She asked with a hiss, feeling rather… troubled at the sudden show of attention.

“Your mana is not flowing the way it should, Master,” he answered easily, eyes boring into hers. “Not that it did before, but now it is hard to miss, and it is getting in the way of things. After all, you did pass out rather unceremoniously, and most disrespectfully, back there. The signs are unmistakable. Most curious, truly; even if your circuits are indeed damaged, that has never stopped you from engaging in all sorts of magecraft, paltry as your attempts at it might have been on the past. Now, however…” The blond suddenly leaned in, lips hovering precariously close to hers, and whispered sibilantly, “…You just feel hollowed out,” and the smirk on his lips when he pulled away and let go of her chin was almost vindictive.

Now supporting the weight of his head on a fist, Gilgamesh regarded her with one of those contemptuous smiles that he used to flash at her when his patience with her was a thin thread that could be very easily cut, dare she say something he deemed inappropriate.

The choice of words, for some unspecified reason, sent a lurch of terror through Hakuno, feeling an even more uncomfortable weight settle in the deepest pits of her stomach. It was stupid and she didn’t know what to make of it, but the feeling was there, sinking and sinking.

Hakuno sensed that he was waiting on her to say something else. Something more. But again, what?

“I must wonder, Hakuno; may there something you’re not quite disclosing?”

Well, damn it. Hakuno blamed her stupid foggy mind for sending him reeling like this. She should have expected, knowing him like she did, that Gilgamesh would catch on something and that of course he would turn this into a competition to see who could catch the other’s lie faster -although turning a blackout episode on a challenge of wills was a little bit ridiculous if you asked her. 

“Really now, Gil? Now I can lie to you?” she asked him, sounding both incredulous and disturbingly amused.

And ah, there it was, of course; that mocking, easy laughter that she was so used from him.

“Of course you cannot, _but_ you can still try, foolish as it might be. Regardless, since it is your body that we are speaking about, it is only natural to think you ought to have more answers as to whatever befalls on it, so let us hear it.”

_Oh, you would be surprised…_

She, for one, was pretty much as much in the dark as he was as to why her body was betraying her like this, or why her brain has decided to gaslight her all of a sudden. Then again, whoever the person from before had been, their use of magecraft had seemed to be the trigger for that particular blackout just then, so could that be it…?

It was definitely that magic just then.

Hakuno licked her lips, unsure if that was suitable enough for an answer. He was quite picky, after all, and while that wouldn’t quite answer the _why_ , it would at least answer the _what_.

If there was something for certain, though, was that Hakuno sure as hell didn’t want to get him passive aggressive at her by leaving out pertinent information, but she didn’t want to give him so much information over something she wasn’t all that sure about that he became volatile over it. And Gilgamesh, Hakuno had little doubts about it, would surely know if she was lying or stretching the truth.

The brunette shook her head gently.

“Well, if you want to hear what’s on my mind, then I’m sure it must have been that flare from before…” she said slowly, as if she were considering some kind of complicated math problem. “…It felt like old magic, my body couldn’t adapt, and I think it’s kind of a miracle that taking all of that at once only made me blackout.”

Just then, there was a flicker of… something in Gilgamesh’s red eyes. Something undefined. It probably meant nothing, Hakuno thought. Perhaps, even, she’s imagined it, but regardless, she made a mental note of it.

He continued to look at her for a moment longer, then said, touching a finger to his lips as if in thought, “so I see.”

Hakuno thought, for a moment, that she saw in him a desire to argue, but to her surprise, _he didn’t_. Whatever train of thought he was entertaining he didn’t seem to want to share it with the rest of the class, which on any other occasion would have made her frown with mild concern. Perhaps he thought that there was nothing of gain for him with further admonitions, which Hakuno honestly found very much hard to believe, but he did seem to have decided to move on, and she wasn’t about to put into question such gratuitous, almost miraculous show of mercy.

After that, they settled down, remaining quiet again for a long moment. Hakuno felt herself relaxing again as the tension melted away. Her body eased back against that of her servant, and allowed for the silence to envelop them once more as they waited for the storm to calm.

The argument over, if only for now, and regardless if it was sincere or not, she quickly took advantage from this and changed the subject when silence became too much to bear.

Hakuno wriggled so that she could look at Gilgamesh more easily.

“…So. Who do you think they were?”

Whatever that was, and whoever they were, it… proved to be truly convenient, and also very concerning. Should a repeat of this happen again…

Gilgamesh made a questioning humming sound at that, one that Hakuno assumed was meant for her to further elaborate on her query.

“You know… the cloaked figure?”

The blond made another humming noise. This one, though, Hakuno took as one of understanding.

“Whoever they might be, they are unworthy of our time. They fulfilled they purpose, and then promptly left. That is all there is to it. Should we cross paths again, we shall know what to expect, and shall act accordingly,” was all he said in response.

Hakuno took it for Gilgamesh’s way of saying ‘we will cross that bridge when we come to it’, and saw no further need to chase after that topic since she had a feeling he would provide no further exposition on that, even if she knew better than to believe the blond would let that slide just like that.

As much as she was fond of her own secrets, Gilgamesh was like a pandora box brimming with them. She’s afraid of what she might find there if one day she dared open its contents.

Almost seemingly coming out of nowhere, a blast of cold wind suddenly blew into the cave. She hastily put her head on his shoulder and pressed further against him, biting back curses as the chill of the storm froze her to the bones.

The blond chuckled, and Hakuno tried not to shiver when he casually laid one arm over her waist.

She could feel something curling up in her, and whatever it was, it wasn’t _fair._

“You benefit way too much of my largesse, you fool,” he said, almost sounding affectionate as a hand came to rest on her head, fingers running softly around her hair and… was he patting her head?

Hakuno threw him a glare, because tactics to keep body heat or not, she could very well tell when she was being treated _like a_ _fucking dog_. However, the accompanying rebuke that she was going to throw his way died in her throat when that hand of his stopped stroking her hair and moved down.

“You do know,” he whispered, bringing the hand that was on her head lower to graze a thumb over her cheek, “if heat is what you seek, I _could_ help with that, by fighting fire with fire. Care to find out?”

Hakuno blinked up at him several times.

Going from mildly threatening to straight up teasing in a single breath, Gilgamesh was a clusterfuck of contradictions. Keeping up with him has never been easy, and she knew she shouldn’t be feeling a single shred of surprise neither at the change of mood nor at the ridiculous claim, but…

“What, you mean right here, _right now_?” she asked with a short laugh.

“Can you conjure any compelling reason why not?”

And then Gilgamesh smiled, so smug, so scathing, so very pleased with himself, that for some ungodly reason, seeing Gilgamesh back to his self-absorbed ways made her sigh in relief, and for the first time since she had awakened inside that cave covered in their own coats as a makeshift source of warmth, Hakuno felt no sense of shame or embarrassment at the other’s proximity.

“I think I told you this once already, but I don’t think mana transfers work the way you want me to believe they do. For starters, they do not work for me; there is no such thing as a reversed version of it.”

But Gilgamesh only made a humming noise at that, sounding like he didn’t care in the slightest.

“It is highly recommended to give hypothermia victims a source of warmth,” he said with a small smile. “And is it not my duty as Servant to provide for my Master’s wellbeing, whatever they may need? Should not a Servant hold their Master’s welfare as their most superior directive?”

Hakuno frowned. That was one big pile of bullshit and she was almost inclined to feel jealous that he could bullshit his way through things with such ease. It was an ability most, she included, would very much like to master for themselves.

“That’s a huge logical fallacy, Gil.”

But he was undeterred.

“What is more, I reckon military training does rely on such methods for cold weather training. I have heard of such methods working well.”

Hakuno really wasn’t sure if today’s brief episode of ‘trivia time with Gilgamesh’ was true or not -if she had to guess by the terrible smile on his lips, it probably wasn’t. She really wasn’t all that sure that she’s suffered from an episode of hypothermia, either.

“Okay, _and_? And more importantly, _why_?”

He shrugged. “Where is that sense of adventure that you flaunted about to me so beautifully upon arrival?”

The brunette looked at him in the eyes for what seemed like an unmeasurable amount of time, studying his features, and then, ever the personification of droll, Hakuno lowered her voice to a whisper as she brought her face closer to his.

Hakuno was playing with fire; she knew as much, and yet, what other choice did she have?

“…You’re just bored, aren’t you?”

He had to be; someone else had denied him of his own entertainment back there by sending those things away, and now his only source of entertainment just so happened to be her.

The deep, rumbling chuckle that ensued was oddly comforting, as was the infuriating shit-eating grin that he responded her with when his laughter subsided.

“On the contrary, Master. I find myself most entertained at the time being. Who would have thought that being thrown around would give you such a second wind…”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

The hand that so casually rested over her waist moved to take her hand in his. His fingers, she briefly felt, traced around her sole command seal before curling around hers.

“But mongrel, whyever would I need to? You already do so on my behalf most sublimely.”

He leaned in to kiss her forehead, an oddly chaste gesture coming from someone who had flaunted about carnality less than a minute before, but sun, moon and stars, she couldn’t be more grateful that he felt so real and so solid and so incredibly warm despite the fact that he was as incorporeal in nature as she was.

And to think, really, that all of this was because she couldn’t bring herself to stop when she had the chance, to lie still and allow herself be consumed, collecting dust in the depths of oblivion where BB had intended to keep her until the end of times.

However, she steered her mind from that train of thought, lest Gilgamesh suddenly learned to read minds and proceeded to violate the privacy of her own.

She instinctively tightened her grip on his hand.

Behind him, what appeared to be small black fractures were spreading outwards. It was the first time she saw them outside her dreamworld; perhaps it was an aftereffect of being almost blinded by that light, or perhaps it wasn’t. She wasn’t sure, but whatever it was… it was concerning as well, and Gilgamesh was right; she _should_ have most of the answers to whatever was happening to her, but she didn’t know where to start looking for answers.

She wondered if her servant was aware of their presence and that was why he even said that to her in the first place, or if it was something that only she could see. Judging by his expression though, it didn’t look like he could feel them, never mind seeing them.

However, just by being with Gilgamesh like that, she felt those fractures retreading back into silence, as the last remnants of that vision, or whatever it was, melted and disappeared, leaving without a trace, returning to the darkness of her subconscious.

Faintly, she thought she heard Gilgamesh say something against her neck sounding suspiciously close to ‘ _If you dare die, I’ll kill you’_ as he pulled her into something resembling an embrace, and whilst she did take notice of how utterly illogic Gilgamesh’s threat sounded, she didn’t make mention of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand our everlastingly unsuspecting couple lands on some strange place holding more secrets than it meets the eye (?). Oh wow, this took so long to write. I'm not really familiar with writing action, so do forgive me if it feels rushed or lacking. Anyway, some familiar faces will show up as things keep progressing. Thank you so much for reading.  
> P.S: also also, since I don't have a draft that is robust enough to provide a summary for the next chapter I guess you'll have to do with some ominous (?) statements taken from there:  
>  _“But Sir, even without magic, can we even hope to beat them?”  
>  The man’s footsteps came to a sudden halt.  
> “Maybe, but the odds are dangerous; they have a hidden trump card.”  
> “… … The evening star,” The boy said flatly._


	4. Chapter III: Out Of Tune

Much to her surprise, their luck held, and when night came to pass the storm finally calmed and she came back to her senses without suffering any weird after effects. The sun rose, the shadows of what Hakuno hoped were merely birds passed quickly from beyond the entrance of the cave and they marched into the woods again, yesterday’s incident passing to memory. Thankfully, none of those things made an appearance.

The coast was clear, at least for now.

As for Gilgamesh, he had gone back to his usual better-than-thou stance and was terribly irritating as he led the way, willfully overcompensating for the mishap from yesterday, even if he wasn’t about to admit it, and looking just as out of place as she did in that comically exotic location that they had landed themselves in.

The air was warm after the storm had cleared, and small animals rustled through the brushes. They moved too fast for her eye to catch a glimpse of, so she could only wonder what kind of animal life this planet had aside from semi-organic weapons -but at the very least it was a comfort, knowing that there was something other than weird predators scavenging for something to munch at. Aside from that, they found nothing of real importance all day.

The two of them continued on through a new path within the forest, heading up-slope. All around them the trees shuddered in the breeze, indifferent to their presence, and eventually it surrendered to what at first glance seemed to be a spring, which lightened her mood a little. Upon closer inspection, there was nothing abnormal about it. On the contrary, it was strangely familiar. There was also a stream coming cascading down a mountainside, full of life and movement. The cheerful splashing sounds provided a homey, warm sense of remembrance to her.

The water was relatively calm and not very deep, and the plants underneath gave it a wonderful turquoise color. She got closer to the water, and gently stroked her fingers through it, stirring it up and causing some ripples.

With the climb ahead appearing to be even steeper than what they had already ascended, and still somewhat worn out from yesterday’s fiasco with whatever those things were, Hakuno found a reason to wave a metaphorical white flag as she spoke to Gilgamesh about staying some more time there.

“Gil, I’d like to stay here some more time,” she announced. “I’m tired of walking and I feel tacky and _gross_. Do you think you can spare me some of that magnanimity and _allow me_ to bathe and rinse this grime off me?”

He seemed to consider this for a moment, gaze trained on her, and then he went horribly bright-eyed, making Hakuno almost regret she even thought of taking a detour to clean herself from the murk those fiends got her covered in.

“Why, I didn’t know you had an exhibitionist within you,” he beamed, almost sounding approving, even.

She glared at him, debating between whether she should feel tired or scandalized. Instead of thinking about it further though, she made a noise of frustration and pressed her hands to her face. “Why do I even try,” she mumbled to herself as she already made her way to undress and get inside the water, pretending she was on a different plane of existence altogether.

Gilgamesh, as always, was uncaring about any of her moral plights.

“Do suit yourself then.”

And of course he would say that.

Miracle of miracles though, and regardless of Gilgamesh using the opportunity to be the most self-absorbed man to ever demonstrate time and time again that he deserved to be _pounded flat_ , Hakuno eventually managed to get rid of him long enough so that she could bathe in those crystalline waters by herself without getting into something mildly dubious, finally able to get rid of all the grime she was covered in since yesterday as well as allowing herself to indulge in much-needed, proper relaxation.

Her slender figure basked in the light of that planet’s star as if she was a precious gem. Right now, even in spite of her usual nondescript appearance, she was like something out of a painting, and most probably, as with most things, she was blissfully unaware of the sort of image she was presenting him with.

 _It was all I needed_ , she thought as she scratched her brown hair, getting rid of whatever traces of dirt remained in there: silence of the comfortable kind as well as _space_ , space away from the overcrowded cities they have visited and stayed at, and space away from Gilgamesh and his incessant mindfuck games, away from him going on and on and on about nothing, ever too in love with how his voice sounded.

Said man, though? He was now lying comfortably on a rock by the springs a few meters above ground, wearing nothing but a pair of black jeans, basking in the sunlight like he was some kind of anthropomorphic sunflower, and in front from where he was lying, in the direction of said spring, was Hakuno, splashing water around the place, ignoring -or trying to- the very invasive feeling of being… watched.

Not by her Servant, she was far too used to both his presence and quirks to feel disturbed by any of it at this point of her existence, no matter how strange it was turning out to be. However, she wasn’t all that prepared to feel again that strange feeling of being peered at by something other, and most disturbing of all was how that feeling never seemed to ever leave her alone. Once more, her moment of respite and tranquility was interrupted like most of her small moments were as of lately.

After a few minutes of awkward silence and the dreadful feeling of being watched sinking deeper and deeper into her stomach, pretending that she wasn’t being surveilled was actually easier said than done, and it was actually infuriating because she couldn’t quite tell _what_ it was. If not Gil, then what was it?

“Is something distracting you so? Can you try to appear less _sullen_?”

Evidently, Gilgamesh caught on her bad feelings, and having decided that she had gone enough without paying him attention, he voiced her thoughts for her.

Hakuno looked like she wished she could be indignant at him, but this has happened so many times before, so what could she do? Instead, she tried to make her aggravation known with a huff, looking around the place with a frown in her face as the tranquility of her moment was desecrated and her worries resurfaced once more, and almost immediately, she could hear her servant sigh tetchily at her.

“Do not tell me; are you still _upset_ over yesterday’s?” the asshole, the fucking asshole, had the gall to sound like this was personally _offending him_. “I was already familiar with you being the guilty type who beats herself up for every little thing that goes wrong, even the ones she cannot control, but still I cannot seem to grasp this obsession you seem to have with _overthinking,”_ he said somewhat condescendingly. “Most important of all, you’re with me, so whatever could be so upsetting about this very moment?”

Gilgamesh, ever the self-absorbed little cretin that he was, believed in earnest that nothing should be upsetting as long as he existed. However, the world didn’t work the way he would have wanted it to.

“…Well, sue me? I can’t help but still sense someone watching us. It’s actually a little… disquieting.”

Gilgamesh snorted from where he was like one would do to an unruly child being overly stubborn over something insignificant. He tilted his head just a little, and regarded her with a small smile. Gilgamesh seemed to be now in a somewhat uppity mood.

“You are imagining things. There is no one out here beside you and myself; or are you truly the kind of woman who, so far gone in your own warped self-perception, would think that anyone would come all the way out here just to see you? Given your plain physique, it’s not like there’s much to look at,” Gilgamesh said carelessly, that small, bland smile of his never leaving.

Hakuno threw a glare at the rock he was currently sitting by and secretly spat towards him. However, Gilgamesh didn’t seem to notice; at the moment he seemed to be entertained looking at some other spot around the springs, and the sound of her spit hitting the water’s surface was indistinct as she splashed water about the place with every movement she made.

Gilgamesh going back to being his usual douchebag self notwithstanding, Hakuno still held on the feeling that there was someone or something watching over them. Gilgamesh could downplay her worries and her precautions all he liked, but she knew the feeling of being preyed upon all too well not to recognize it when it was there. However, as Gilgamesh seemed not to think too much of it, Hakuno had to wonder if this had something to do with his ego, or if she was giving this too much of a thought.

Evidently, her ears caught on the sound of her servant’s mocking and contemptuous snort coming from where he stood the moment her arms went to cover her modesty, moving towards the shore of the springs and then pulling herself out the water to gather back her clean clothes, her hair dripping wet as she tried to get rid of the excess of water clinging to it before starting to put on her clothes.

Her servant watched her go, his head turning to follow her the entire way with a little knowing smile on his face. She couldn’t see it, but she could imagine it.

“Oh? Over so soon?”

The brunette threw him a glare, frown ever present on her face.

“I know this is a minority opinion for you, but believe it or not some of us have boundaries. You should try that sometime.”

Gilgamesh made a sound like he was almost personally offended by it.

“Would you have preferred it if I had left you alone in the elements? I believe most certainly _not_ ; that would have been regrettable for sure.”

 _Regrettable for who?_ Hakuno asked herself wryly.

“Your concern fulfills me, really…” she deadpanned to herself, crouching down to grab some clothes to put on. From this distance, and unless Gilgamesh had somehow developed some kind of enhanced hearing ability along the way, there was no way he heard that.

“Or would it make it better should I join you, instead?” he asked then, raising a brow.

Her face colored as she closed her eyes and bit the inside of her cheek before saying, “Not required, Gil, not requested, and certainly _not even suggested_ ,” she groaned, though she felt an alarming flicker of _something_ stirring inside of her.

She only managed to hastily put on her underwear and a pair of clean trousers before the sound of his light laughter became too aggravating to ignore. When she turned her head to look up his way, arms around her chest once again, it was to see Gilgamesh still sprawled over the rock like a panther but with his legs now spread lewdly. Of course, Hakuno noticed the change of position was deliberate; she tried to ignore him, as she already had learned how to, but she found it was actually impossible with how he was lying like that, and she hated him all the more for this, whatever this was.

He smirked at her when their eyes met.

“You truly have a strange way of working, don’t you? We keep dancing this dance of ours time and time again, yet you still choose the oddest of times to act this coy…” he broke off to eye her mischievously, resting a cheek in one fist as he watched her. “This wouldn’t be the first time you’ve presented yourself to me, would it? So what is so wrong now that you see the need to hide yourself?”

The casual derisiveness in his tone of voice as he stared at her from his slightly elevated position on that rock like she was some kind of fascinating playtime made it all the more irksome.

The brunette clicked her tongue as she turned around once more to put on her bra, not sure if she had the energy to come up with a witty remark to that. Instead, Hakuno was struck with the familiar urge to finish putting on her clothes and walk away pretending she heard nothing of that, partially because the man was thoroughly irritating, his smug levels too toxic for human consumption, but mostly because he was _actually fucking right._ She was tempted to reply him with a ‘ _watch me’_ , but she had to bite it back because she knew he was right, and worst of all, he knew it as well and it was exasperating.

And not only was he right, he was right and absolutely knew what he was doing, but in Hakuno’s defense, Gilgamesh was Gilgamesh, and he was usually never upfront with his words, and the times he was indeed upfront about something, he relied on action rather than speech, so you had to read between the lines to parse the true meaning of his confusing speeches, and Gil’s lines were all wobbly. Hakuno got confused just reading them, never mind _reading between them_.

Sure, they've shared beds and all sorts of cramped up spaces plenty of times before, not to mention the fact that they bathed together many a times as well. But this felt different, somehow. More personal, more intrusive, maybe because the array of contradictory emotions that was her companionship with her servant had never gone much farther than furtive touches, and he mostly acted like he didn’t much care about it, and perhaps, Hakuno had thought, he didn’t; perhaps fleeting, idle touches was normal enough for him that they should be dismissed, that perhaps, then, she should be doing exactly the same. Yes, fine, she was only _human_ -technically speaking, sure-, so of course she’d thought about him and what it might be like; it's hard not to when they spent so much time with the other on a daily basis, but he was such a selfish asshole all the time she always disregarded the thought -except for the times when he wasn’t, and he became slightly more forgiving, and even the more confusing and the thoughts came back.

 _It’s a trap_ , her mind would remind her every so often, but she knew it in her heart that it was something much more convoluted than that, and the answer, she felt, was also more personal than she wanted to know, so all she could do was glare at the water as she thought of something to say, and when it did finally come to her, she put on a plain white shirt before twirling around, staring back at him with a frown on her face, her tongue coming unglued.

“Does it _really_ matter? Five minutes before you were saying I was too ‘plain’ for your _exquisite_ _palette,_ or anyone's for that matter,” she said tiredly, sitting on some nearby rock so that she could put on her boots back on.

Gilgamesh shot an irritating grin in Hakuno’s direction, one that could melt the poles, yet strangely eerie, like candy wrapped in a pretty envelope with a touch of arsenic.

“Perhaps,” Gilgamesh started to say, unfazed by the accusation. “But lucky for you, Hakuno, I have become accustomed to these little dances of ours, and whilst you might not be made of gold, I do have my soft spots. And considering that you’re little more than a mere commoner, it seems to me that a smidgen of _gratitude_ for this wouldn’t be misplaced.”

Oh, _wow,_ what an arrogant bastard.

If there was irony in his voice, Hakuno couldn’t detect it regardless of how much his words made her want to wipe off that smug smirk off his face, which again, made the whole exchange all the more disconcerting.

“I really have to wonder what about any of this _isn’t_ turning me on,” she drawled sarcastically, not really wanting to know what sort of soft spots he had, neither metaphorically nor literally. “You can’t possibly be arguing with me about _this_ in the literal middle of nowhere,” she deadpanned then.

But he could, and he was.

“I would never intend to keep hidden something as intrinsic to I from my Master,” he continued, pretending not to have heard her. “Although I can’t seem to be able to say the same from them; uninterested people usually do not have terror in their eyes when things go too far, unless they are not truly as uninterested as they believe.” he said somewhat reproachfully.

“I… _what_?” she choked out, mouth suddenly dry. No one would say such a thing without meaning something else, but the worst thing was that Hakuno was not sure if Gilgamesh was making a joke out of her or not; it was a state of being that she had grown used to, much to her dismay, not _knowing._ “…Okay, this is officially one of the strangest conversations I have ever had with you," Hakuno said after coming back from her initial shock. "But sure, whatever you say."

Upon further reflection, Hakuno recognized what he was trying to do. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s seen him do it, and it would certainly not be the last. It was an habit that he had. Gilgamesh would attempt to twist the things around him so that they benefitted him, suggesting that he knew you better than you actually knew yourself, that you were hiding something behind layers upon layers of deceit and that he, of course, was clever enough to see through them. The only difference between all those other times and now was that Hakuno had her doubts about whether or not he was bluffing, or if he had finally found something hidden within her.

Gilgamesh, unyielding on not letting the subject alone, then decided to jump from the rock where he’d been standing. She didn’t think a normal human would have come unscathed from a fall from that height, but then again, he wasn’t one to begin with. He landed on the ground on his two feet, the water only reaching up to the lower half of his legs as he strode forward, and before she knew, her servant was standing before her on the shore, eating up all of her personal space, no concept of privacy or boundaries whatsoever. Then again, this was something she had grown herself used to as well -of Gilgamesh being _everywhere_ , the overpowering scent that she had grown to associate to him something she could never ever hope to rid herself of.

"Hm? Do you deny it then? Don’t you want to be taken care of?”

Hakuno was about to scoff at this -as if she would confess whatever he believed were her feelings in such a way- but in spite of her annoyance and her wounded pride, something coiled low in her belly, the sensation not unfamiliar; just like he said, she’s danced this dance with him enough times to recognize it for what it was, making her heart flutter to the rhythm of something she was too terrified to give a name to, too aware of his body so close to hers.

She really shouldn’t be encouraging him like this, knowing for a fact that this would only set a dangerous precedent, but…

She hesitated for a second before giving him an answer. Hakuno put a finger on her chin, and then spoke. “…Do you _really_ just hang around waiting for a good chance to cut in with a bait?" she retorted with a hint of mischief in her tone, just barely able to conceal the underlying trepidation in her voice.

Gilgamesh grinned that terrible, self-satisfied smile of his, undeterred as he always was when he found himself amused.

"With you providing so many easy openings on your own? I have no need for such things,” he said, sounding far too riveted for someone who’s been denied of a real answer to what was clearly intended to be a bait. “…I can show you, if you so desire,” he murmured indulgently, breath ghosting over her face as he chuckled. “It won’t involve anything you haven’t already done with I.”

“Oh, really now,” she breathed out, a confused sound escaping from her lips, and it was only when his mouth was centimeters away from hers that she realized this was not a drill, not a joke.

Hakuno knew what the answer to that should be. However, she couldn’t make it come out, and for some reason, that strange feeling of déjà vu hit her again full force until all of a sudden it felt like she went back on time, with Gilgamesh not being quite Gilgamesh, and she not being quite herself.

“…Then this is one of those debt-collecting schemes of yours, isn’t it?” Hakuno inquired, her tone light but still feeling trapped for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom.

Her Servant laughed, sharp and toxic, carefully carding his fingers through her wet hair, making her shiver. “You absurd woman, always thinking of pain first… how do you expect to get hold of yourself if you keep _repressing_ it all?” he murmured, and for a moment she got the feeling that he was talking to himself out loud again, a far-off look in his garnet eyes as he seemed to be trying to peer inside of her for _something_.

Nonetheless, Hakuno’s eyebrow twitched slightly, feeling patronized, but when she was about to bite, their awkward moment was interrupted by an intense rumbling. She'd been so focused on Gilgamesh and his mindfuck games that for a crazed split second, she thought it was thunder, but that couldn’t be, of course; the skies were as clear as ever, with no traces of lingering thunderclouds whatsoever, but the fact still stood that the trees around them began to shake as a huge explosion shook the whole place, the ground vibrating beneath her boots.

It must have occurred somewhere close to where they stood, or otherwise they wouldn’t have felt it so directly, but still very far from where they were. As for the cause of the explosion, one could only guess. Hakuno thought it sounded like a giant had impacted the ground, or as if someone had land crashed there. A hot smell of burned metal and ozone reached her nose.

What… was that?

It was over a second later, the silence so sudden and complete that she thought she'd gone deaf, all movement stopped. Even Gilgamesh seemed to have lost the edge of his teasing; she saw the determined set to his jaw and instantly knew he itched to see what that was, recognizing the look as the one he made whenever he was looking forward to have the kidneys of whoever or whatever had dared to interrupt the King in his merriment.

 _Interrupted by an explosion. On our way to search for ‘treasure’ on some faraway planet, no less_ , she thought, amazed at the absurdity of the very idea. At first, she wasn’t all that sure they would even find anything of worth there other than death traps and vegetation, but she was warming up more and more to this exploration thing they got themselves into. Even if there was no treasure to be found there, and minus the slight inconvenience of almost getting mauled to death by overgrown praying mantises and having the constant feeling of being under surveillance, this was hands down the most exciting thing they had encountered in a whole week of sailing the vast sea of stars, and it even managed to put a stop on Gilgamesh’s less than subtle attempts at being a smartass.

Maybe it was the rush of adrenaline clouding her mind, perhaps, even, it was Gilgamesh’s bad habits rubbing off on her, but she was… alight.

Following instinct rather than reason, and taking advantage of the confusion, Hakuno spun around and sprinted towards the direction she thought she heard the earth-shaking sound, leaving a trail of water behind her as small droplets fell from the still wet strands of her hair as she ran.

Gilgamesh dropped his head back with a regretful sigh as he watched her march into the forest again.

"And _where_ do you think you're going?" she heard her Servant’s sibilant voice call behind her, already hot on her heels.

Hakuno didn’t even bother looking back, knowing that Gilgamesh would catch up to her soon, so she just continued rushing onward like someone lit a fire under her.

“What do you think? To make bad decisions! Like I always do!”

* * *

In keeping with recent tradition, the forest, as they delved deeper within, became silent once more.

 _A bad omen, for sure_ , Hakuno thought.

Hakuno saw Gilgamesh close his eyes, listening to his surroundings. Aside from their own breathing, there was nothing else that any of them could hear, which of course, as Hakuno already knew by now, it was impossible: Insects, animals, birds, the sound of moving leaves, even _beasts_. There had to be something. The last time they found their surroundings this silent they found something more than only halfway unpleasant, so the reality of the situation hit Hakuno like a sucker punch to the gut as they marched into the direction of the explosion.

If someone had been caught by those things… then again, aside from that strange figure in white, there was no one on sight as far as they have seen. The place had life, but it was _abandoned_.

Still, though…

Then, as if to further fuel her bad feelings, something moved in the bushes. Something that was definitely bigger than an alien squirrel.

Hakuno spun toward the sound, aiming at the shrub as the holo projection of her casting console came to life before her, but faster than she could ever hope to be, Gilgamesh had already fired several weapons from his vault in random directions, the golden light of his gates catching the last of the movement, the leaves still shaking. In the almost deadly silence, she tried to listen carefully for sounds of impact, and from what she could hear, Gilgamesh had managed to hit several trees, but there were no dying cries nor the familiar squelching sound of bodies bleeding out and falling dead on ground.

“All this lead-up is getting boring,” Gilgamesh declared then. “Let us make haste, Hakuno; wherever it is that this is taking us, I wouldn’t want it to turn into a complete waste of our time.”

Well, he was right on one thing at least; they couldn’t stand there loitering around, alien raccoons or not.

As they advanced, an entire assortment of huge trees, laying shattered and broken, became visible, forming a straight path through the forest. The downed trunks showed signs of having been seared by tremendous heat, and the further they advanced, the more evident it became that whatever had scorched them had been an asteroid, because if that had been indeed the case, they would be walking through a crater, and the ground there was level.

It was as if something massive had descended from above and cut through the forest.

Then, a sound tugged at her ear. It was small at first, then it swiftly grew in intensity as seconds passed. Hakuno frowned, trying to make out the sound in the distance, and then she realized that it was the sound of someone _screaming_ , the sort of desperate, adrenaline-infused scream someone would make when both in pain and facing something very, _very_ dangerous, and it was coming from the end of that path. Perhaps it was her imagination, but although she wasn't all that sure about it, Hakuno was almost sure that the words ‘ _Oh, fuck this!_ ’ could also be heard somewhere along that incoherent shriek.

Of course, without thinking much of anything, she rushed and followed the path of fallen trees and scorched soil, not one to ever hesitate when someone was in potential danger, even if it was a complete stranger, and when they reached the end of it, they found themselves in an open space. As to be expected, there was nothing of real importance to be found there. Just rocks, flowers, more trees, more rocks, more flowers and…

She took some more steps closer, swallowing dryly, counting backward from ten as she took in the scenery before her eyes.

The scene that greeted them was shocking, at least for her, and only the knowledge that it could have been that much _worse_ put her nerves somewhat more at ease: just like the path that they had followed, the ground all around them was scorched to a crisp, like something had hit it, Hakuno then coming to the realization that this had to be the exact place where that explosion they heard some minutes ago had come from. There was blood splattered here and there, and coupled with how silent the place was, it felt much too eerie for her already fragile nerves to handle.

Her gaze shifting away from the disaster, almost at the very end of that space, she thought she saw a person's silhouette near one of the rocks, but it wasn't moving. Someone asleep, maybe. 

Or hurt.

 _Or dead_.

Once again driven by the familiar impulse of helping others without expecting to be given anything in return, Hakuno ran the last few steps towards them, Gilgamesh right behind her and already looking irked by her complete lack of self-awareness. 

The silhouette that she saw was, in fact, a woman lying on top of an oval rock; or rather, a young girl.

A human.

Hakuno estimated that she was about the same age as her, and from the look of things, she hadn't exactly fared well from whatever was that attacked her. The woman was injured, blood seeping from her leg and puddling around her. Considering that Hakuno’s life was by all means unreasonable beyond what could already be considered unreasonable by human standards -from being preyed at by a psychotic AI to facing a godly supercomputer to then being dragged away from her virtual prison by a glorified golden tyrant who was secretly more tsun tsun than dere dere-, a human’s presence here wasn't unlikely, but the fact that she was still in one piece after the damage sustained definitely was. 

Around her were several clusters of what appeared to be lilies shining in a pale fluorescence. The flowers were emitting some kind of faint humming noise, and if Hakuno didn’t know any better, it almost looked like she was lying on some kind of primitive shrine.

The woman was now trying to bring herself to a sitting position, having somewhat regained a portion of her strength, and she stared at them both for a long moment, her unfocused gaze darting back and forth nervously, but then she sagged, falling back against the stones. Hakuno hurried over, crouching down next to the wounded woman, and took her hand in hers gently, alarmed at how pale she was, only then noticing the red markings that were there, showcasing her status as a fellow Master for all to see, and well… Hakuno has seen Servants without Masters before, but a Master without a Servant, though?

There was blood oozing from her nose as well, and her clothes were soaked with it.

Then, her lips parted slightly, and through a croaked groan, she managed to articulate a word, bringing Hakuno’s attention back to her. Despite the incredible pain she must have been in, she still was conscious enough to speak.

“…You…”

Hakuno looked back into her eyes, and could feel a powerful force peering out at her.

“…Me?”

Through clenched teeth, the woman gave out a mirthless laugh.

“…You are in fucking trouble.”

_Huh?_

Hakuno didn’t understand what she was saying. She gave her a puzzled look, not sure what to answer to that, and then a definite sound coming from her left decided it for her.

Hakuno wasn’t given much time to be disturbed by the person’s words. Instead, though, she was disturbed by something else; something far more incredible.

At her left stood what seemed to be a statue, unmoving at first, but now only starting to vibrate with energy. The lower parts of its body were covered in moss, and there were more of those white lilies growing at the top of its head. And if just to remind the brunette of how unreasonable the world around her has become, the statue’s eyes flashed green and then it began to raise from the ground.

Hakuno started to step backwards, almost bumping against her Servant, who had remained surveilling her from behind all the while, watching it stand higher and higher. The thing was almost thirty feet tall and showed no signs of slowing down. It looked like a giant muscular stone man with four arms. Compared to the rest of the body, its head was rather small, you couldn’t even quite make out its eyes or nose. However, in spite of the fact that they could not see them, it gave off the impression that it was staring back at them, and even though those very small eyes were flashing green, Hakuno could tell it wasn’t pleased with their presence. Once more, she got the exact same feeling she got back when they encountered the figure in white -a sudden surge of ancient magic hanging in the air, overpowering, and feeling very out of place.

Just when she thought that the crossbreed of a praying mantis and a worm was terrible enough, the universe had to come up with something even more nonsensical to one-up to that.

“W-What the _hell_ is that?” she mumbled, eyes never leaving the statue as it rose to life.

And whatever did she know; of course, Gilgamesh knew what it was, never one to miss an opportunity to show just how knowledgeable he was on every little thing to have ever existed.

“I do believe it is a megalithic infantryman; in other words, a golem,” Gilgamesh explained briefly, eyeing the statue-like being as if it was some kind of hidden jewel rather than a source of impending doom, and then he clicked his tongue in mild disappointment. "How typical. Not to mention predictable."

The golem then stopped rising, now reaching at least forty feet tall. The statue crouched down a little so that it was leaning its face somewhat closer to where they stood, and then, of course, as if following some kind of raw instinct that only beasts possessed, it roared at them, forgetting all about the other person laying wounded on a rock nearby, seemingly deciding that she and Gilgamesh were much more interesting to prey upon.

Hakuno wasn’t sure if she should feel shocked or just grateful that this time around no actual bodily fluids came out of its tiny mouth. Sure, while being looked down by some forty feet giant could send anyone into a state of shock, having to face down a supercomputer made God tended to put certain things in perspective, and after facing what appeared to be some sort of semi-organic weapons made to look like insects, she at least saw this one coming now.

As she stared at the statute with unconcealed morbid fascination, Hakuno was struck with something of an idea; not the greatest idea she’s ever had, sure, but an idea nonetheless.

She took some steps forward much to her Servant’s apparent displeasure, if the disapproving growl she had just heard coming from behind her was anything to go by, and just to satisfy her curiosity on just how resilient said weapon was, Hakuno pointed a finger at the golem. A holographic projection came to life right in front of where she was, glowing in a faint purplish light, and Hakuno entered a command. A small, concentrated ball of mana, smaller than a soccer ball, came out from her fingertip and slammed into its marbled surface.

It didn't even tickle it. Hakuno doubted it even noticed anything at all.

Hm.

Oh _well_.

That was problematic.

The giant finally noticed its prey was trying to actually harm it, and as it looked down on them again, it bellowed, not looking very happy that someone tried to desecrate it regardless of the fact that they had failed to do so. And so, in retaliation, a bright flash of light shone from an opened gap in its abdomen.

Gilgamesh grabbed Hakuno by the arm with enough force to carry her out of the way before the beam of light that came out from there merely seconds after could so much as graze her, letting it instead burn the ground right where she had been standing.

“You fool!" Gilgamesh shouted, red eyes glowing in what was _almost_ the most menacing she’s ever seen him. "Don’t try to get its attention!"

"I wasn’t trying to get its attention, I was trying to find a way to kill it!"

"Woman!” He seized her by the shoulders. “You of all people should know better than that!"

"I don't care. I need to—"

“— _Fool._ I as well cannot seem to understand this other _obsession_ that you have with throwing yourself at danger. Do you try to hurt yourself on purpose or is it something that you do to belittle me?” If it was even possible, Gilgamesh’s already glowing eyes glowed even a deeper red. 

Seeing his disapproving scowl, Hakuno couldn’t help but frown back at him, her mind already settled ever since the moment she saw the redhead bleeding out by her own; no amount of tantrums and condescending words would change her mind.

“I’m not _trying_ to get myself killed, no,” Hakuno said immediately. “No— I’m _not_ , but I’m also not leaving her behind; not if it gets her killed in return,” she grated out, shaking her head vehemently. “Not if I—” and then she stopped, once again interrupted by her own Servant.

“By allowing herself to come unprepared, this woman made a mistake by her own volition. People are responsible for their own things, not _you_. Is truly the life of one fool so important that you would willingly throw yours away? Don’t get distracted, not even for a moment. Don’t avert your eyes.”

"You _really_ want to have the last word, don’t you?" she deadpanned, watching warily at the giant from the corner of her eye as it was readying itself to fire another beam at them, energy concentrating around its abdomen as it did before.

This was really not the time for this, but…

“Look, as I said, I’m not leaving her behind,” she said, spreading her arms helplessly about her. “Besides, Gil, it’s another human we’re talking about. What are the odds of this ever happening again? And sure, this place you made us land on a whim is weird and all, but what makes this any more dangerous than any other thing we're likely to find out there? It’s worth the shot.”

As he shrugged and crossed his arms, eying her carefully, Hakuno could tell that he wanted to argue further with her on the suitability of taking someone with them, human or not, _wounded or not_ , so it didn’t quite come as a surprise when-

"Say ‘please’."

There was a sudden pause as Hakuno digested the words that were said to her, and then, recovering her sense of self, she said, "Really? Really Gil, really?"

Ever the drama king, of course he would decide to have a moral debate with her when there was a _giant monster covered in flowers_ rising from the ground and preparing to launch another shot at them. A nasty smile spread across his face, and all the while, Hakuno could still hear the faint buzzing of the Colossus’ charging beam getting louder and louder.

Hakuno stared at her Servant in mild disbelief. Then she turned her gaze away from him, casting a wayward glance at the injured woman, a myriad of conflicting emotions swirling across her eyes, and then back at her Servant again before her eyelids squeezed together in a frustrated expression. "Oh, out of all the times you could chose to be an _egotistical_ …" she took in a deep breath, counting to three slowly inside her head, and equally slowly she let it out. "All right. King of Heroes, could you _kindly_ assist your poor Master in her quest to vanquish that _giant monster covered in fucking flowers_ over there as she is incapable of doing so by her own power?"

Arms still crossed against his chest, Gilgamesh tapped at his forearm with the tips of his fingers, waiting for something else.

“ _Please_?”

Gilgamesh finally, _fucking finally_ , sneered, then took a battle stance.

“Finally, a command worth listening to.”

As he said so, their attacker had finished charging, and another blast came out their way.

Hakuno and Gilgamesh threw themselves in opposite directions as the infantryman shot another beam at them again. It focused on Gilgamesh and followed, throwing fist after fist at its feet, making the world rumble with every impact, but he was quick enough to keep out of reach. As much as it was relentless, its massive weight rendered it slow.

“Having to resort to such obsolete tactics… I could almost pity you, but my mongrel here seems adamant on making a good deed, and unfortunately, you got in my way and made yourself to be extremely bothersome.”

The blond passed his fingers through the air, and following his command, several golden ripples appeared and bended reality, from which a myriad of weapons, clearly low-grade from what Hakuno could see, came out blasting faster than the eye could follow. The weapons ricocheted against the hardened body of the colossus, and exploded into sparks. Several flowers were blasted away by the impacting force of Gilgamesh’s assortment of weapons, but other than that, the forest’s guardian remained unaffected.

The ground beneath her kept rumbling time and time again as the giant charged against the blond again, having forgotten all about her. Hakuno used that to her advantage to rush back to the woman’s side again, and as she ran, in that instant and with just a single command, the area around the two of them flashed a bright purple as an improvised barrier rose to cover them within a circle drawn with Hakuno at the center -it was almost as if a single streak of the brightest of purples had cut through the white and gold.

From her position shielding the unconscious woman and having already made her best efforts in mending whatever wounds she was able to heal without completely running out of mana to support Gilgamesh with, Hakuno watched the battle unfold before her eyes, trying to keep up with her Servant as he switched weapons at breakneck speed, so much that all that she could see was a flash of gold hit time and time again against the rocky surface of their opponent, although other than enraging it further and knocking out more flowers, it wasn’t doing much of anything.

She frowned as she watched the fight keep going and going.

When it came to throw down a monster like that, there was always a weak spot. For this one, if Hakuno’s gut instinct was right, said weak spot had to be found in that hole it had in its abdomen from where it shot those concentrated laser beams, so they just had wait for it to charge once more so that it will open again, then they could hurl something painful through there and repeat that again as many times as it took.

Now granted, Hakuno supposed that it was easier said than done, as there were a few things missing in that formula. One was the fact that Gilgamesh’s weapons simply bounced against the infantryman’s seemingly impenetrable skin, sturdy and durable like that of a diamond even when at first glance it did not seem to be made of such. The other was, of course, this precarious position in which she was stuck trying to protect a semi-unconscious human, and herself included, from falling debris, stray flying swords, and whatnot.

Had Hakuno been alone, like this girl had been, she would have been forced to take her chances and most probably end up exactly like she did or perhaps even worse. Fortunately, she was not without a Servant and she was also capable of handling herself, because regardless of how subpar her grasp on attacking magic still was despite her best efforts on steadily improving it for her sake, she was not completely without resources; her barriers could still take a fair amount of punishment, mana could still be given much more uses and sure that thing was big and dangerous, but so had been many other things she had been forced to deal with over the time since she awakened as a Master back on the Moon Cell, so what could it do against them?

However, just then, her internal debate with herself came to an abrupt stop by a coughing fit, and looking absolutely lost in the delirium brought forth by pain and blood loss, Hakuno heard her fellow human try to engage in speech again, sounding tired and broken and sarcastic all at once. She almost felt jealous at such a varied display of emotions.

“…You could try to throw a fucking meteor at that thing and you might… _fuck,_ not even scratch it. Good _fucking_ grief,” she said in a rasp, “they sure know how to fucking create effective monsters.”

Whoever ‘they’ were, Hakuno didn’t have the slightest clue of what she was saying and it wasn’t making her feel reassured at all, but before she could give it much of a thought or even try to ask her for more details on who ‘they’ were and how she even got herself there in the first place, an inhuman scream drew her attention away from the redhead and back to her Servant.

Gilgamesh appeared to have caught on its weak spot as well. Not that it was difficult considering the fact that it glowed every time it attempted to attack with something other than its fists or feet.

Burning golden lights flashed around Gilgamesh once more. He thrusted his hand forward, releasing a fiery lance that plunged right into the exposed hole in its stomach, the only place not covered by its impenetrable skin as it prepared to discharge another of its energy blasts.

The golem lurched back in surprise at the blow, the energy that was accumulating dissolving into nothingness as it bellowed in pain, staggering around in its massive weight, swaying back and forth as it was relentlessly being hit with barrage after barrage of weapons to its center, and instead of its usual predatory roars, its cries were now more resembling those of an agonizing animal. Now that Gilgamesh had figured out how to cheat the rules, Hakuno had little doubts that he would exploit it for all it was worth.

Gilgamesh’s arsenal grew from low-grade to mid-grade as the colossal kept taking the punishment, until one struck right at the core of its gapped abdomen, and the infantryman came to a thunderous landing, the whole ground beneath her trembling violently by the force of the impact. It even managed to knock out some nearby trees.

However, and remaining mostly unimpressed, Gilgamesh looked at the infantryman up and down once before saying,

“Well, this has been of little interest, in the end,” he muttered. “What you clearly lack in creativity you cannot so much as compensate it with anything that remotely resembles originality."

Another golden portal, bigger than those Gilgamesh had summoned at the beginning, appeared in a sudden flash of red and golden lights, and from within, ever so slowly creeping out, came out a single blade; its red and black spinning blades very familiar and of striking visibility even from where Hakuno was crouched down, glowing brightly and eerily.

“…Forced once more to endure the penury of being denied of entertainment. I tire of your existence, so do allow me to demonstrate who the true, superior weapon is.”

In something of a mocking gesture, the blond gave Ea’s hilt a few spins, and then swung it up for all to see. It took Gilgamesh less than a few passing seconds to start laughing maniacally like someone out from a mental ward, as if he was having the time of his life -because there was really no other explanation for this degree of sadism-, and then energy surged up toward Ea. She could feel how the beginning of Gilgamesh’s Noble Phantasm was slowly draining her of mana, taking and taking and _taking_ ; like thousands of arms reaching to her, clawing against her flesh, digging into her mind.

Her breath caught in her throat.

A wave of concentrated light flew from Ea and hit the guardian in the form of a whistling galaxy, passing right through its supposedly impenetrable armor as if it were nothing more than normal flesh, shattering its upper body. Pieces of its body rained down onto the ground like small meteorites, making the whole forest shake violently once more as the ground around them almost became one big crater. She redoubled her efforts with the barrier, pushing even more mana into it so that the falling debris wouldn’t break the dome of the shield that kept both she and the redhead safe from being smashed to bloody pieces, but coupled with the surge of magic that she needed to provide Gilgamesh with to allow him use his Noble Phantasm, it felt more and more like she was being sucked dried from her life source until nothing was left.

Within a blink of an eye her entire vision was obscured with that white flash. Instinctively, Hakuno covered her face with an arm, trying her best to curb the screaming that was threatening to come out from her throat. All around her there was a black fog, and she was surrounded by total darkness.

Then, a ringing sound became clearer, going through her eardrums and into her brain. She faintly recognized it; a melody echoing in her ears.

The sounds of the battlefield sounded so far away, that only the melody remained. She felt like she was being sucked into a never-ending hole into the ground. It was… an unrelenting feeling.

* * *

_The melody is bouncing and light. There was laughter as well, all of it melting into one joyful sound. A woman, her amber eyes achingly familiar, wanted her to dance with her. She took her hand in hers, and spun her around the room. Magical and almost ethereal, her chestnut colored hair framed her face._

_“Blood is sound, sound is words, and words are power. You have to remember this melody well, Hakuno.”_

_Her voice was accented as she spoke, enough to earn more than one hushed, judging whisper behind her back -unlike the two of them, she still remembered, and still retained the language of the Old Country._

_Her movements were quick as she led her through the music in the smallness of their room. Her body moved to the beat of the music as if it belonged to her -perhaps it did-, and she could only follow her clumsily._

_Professor always said she was too quick and clever for her own good, and he didn’t like the things she taught the two of them, secrets that shouldn’t be made known to children their age -such as how to unlock doors that shouldn’t be unlocked… and in the secrecy of their own rooms, when the nurses weren’t looking, magic._

_A remnant of the old world, before the Fall._

**_Is this what dying feels like?_ **

_The music washed over her, and she lost herself to the familiar melody._

_“Come one, Hakuno. Just three little steps: one, two, three. Count the steps in your head, my little dove: one, two, three.”_

_And she began to count, mouthing one, two, three to herself, first inside her head, and then in a whisper._

**_Whether my eyes are opened or closed makes no difference, so this_ ** **must _be what dying feels like._**

_The music continued, and as if born from a desire to make it company, the woman hummed along, matching the lonely melody._

**_…I’ve never felt so cold. If this isn't dying, then what is it?_**

_The melody shifted and distorted then. The music sped up, and with it, so did the dance._

**_I don't want to be all alone here, forever._ **

_“... There are more things I should teach the two of you, Hakuno, but my time here is short. Though I doubt you will remember them all, try to remember most.”_

_She wanted to tell her she wasn’t right, that soon there would be a new treatment tried, something that Professor Piecemann hoped would abate the symptoms, however-_

**_... must I really be alone here, forever?_ **

_“The women of our family are dreamers, my little dove. Listen well to your dreams and promise me that you will never forget. Never forget where you come from and who you are. Promise me you will not forget this."_

_“Of course! I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die!"_

**_No, I won't be alone._ **

* * *

…And the music stopped, her senses returning to her, and through the small cracks of black ink that were receding ever so slowly as her vision returned to her, she could make out the aftermath of Gilgamesh’s Noble Phantasm. She looked around, noticing that the ground that hadn’t been blasted by the falling body parts of the vanquished monster was now covered in what appeared to be an endless sea of flower petals, all of the purest white.

Her breath wasn’t coming as smooth as she would have liked, and in fact she even found herself coughing a little as she struggled to get up. It was hard to form a coherent thought process, and she found it more difficult to steady her breath.

That… was a lot of mana, and it left on her a strange feeling, too; even though she was getting better at providing mana, that feeling of being drained dry was one she could hardly get used to.

With the peril of being crushed to death gone, the barrier she’d raised above their heads slowly receded back into nothingness until there was not trace left of it, and finally Hakuno could have a moment to catch her breath.

Slowly, she raised herself from the ground. Finding her footing after sparing so much of her mana was difficult, but being mindful of the chunks of stone that had fallen from the sky she managed to stumble her way to her Servant, who was standing up straight and staring at what was left of the golem with an unreadable expression.

Its entire upper body was gone, but that wasn’t the end of it. When it shattered in millions of stony pieces and hit the ground less than a moment later after Gilgamesh’s Noble Phantasm, it was no longer the relentless Colossus of destruction it seemed to be. Instead, it had been reduced to nothing more than charcoal. And out of tune with the rest of the scenery, in a gentle cascade of white, a flowerfall of petals, those that had once been adorning the infantryman’s entire body, was falling on them.

Even more incredible was the fact that it left remnants of itself; Gilgamesh’s Noble Phantasm should have erased the thing’s existence from the very boundary of reality, yet it was taking an awful lot for it to melt away into ash as it should.

“Unsurprisingly, all of my expectations always do end up being betrayed. Nonetheless, credit where credit's due," Gilgamesh started to say as he continued his own inspection, “it was a suitable attempt at recreating an impressive beast,” he cooed. “Perhaps in other circumstances I might have been tempted to keep it as a pet. However…”

Still looking at what remained of it, and being reminded of who they found before, Hakuno shook herself out of her trance.

"Well, okay," she said. "That's done, one less thing to worry about. Now what?"

Gilgamesh raised one questioning eyebrow at her. She sighed for the umpteenth time that day.

“…Uh… The still pretty much alive and very much _human_ girl that’s over there and that we’ve found almost bleeding herself to _death_? What about that?”

Gilgamesh gave the semi-unconscious redhead a sideway glance and then shot her one of his familiar looks of cool disdain.

“For all the good this will do," the blond muttered unpleasantly, crossing his arms against his chest. “I have no interest in carrying that mongrel over there everywhere. You made the decision to save her -she is now your responsibility. Take her, if you so desire, or do not. It is entirely up to you.”

She really expected nothing less. There was a brief pause as Hakuno weighed the option of complaining to Gilgamesh about his disregard for basic human mercy, but a muffled groan beat her to it.

“ _M’sh_?”

A soft croak of what Hakuno could only assume was someone else’s name came from behind them, and as if she had been struck by a bolt of lightning, she dashed back to the injured woman, coming to her knees next to her and hurriedly checking her over. Gilgamesh stood exactly where he was, eyeing the two of them carefully.

“Hey, hey,” she said softly, reaching to check her pulse. “How are you feeling?”

The girl mumbled grumpily, and if it wasn’t because she was severely weakened by her wounds, Hakuno strongly suspected she would have been swatted away. “Like I’ve been hit by a truck,” she said blearily, her clearest sentence so far, sucking in a breath of pain as she looked around, eyes closing and opening as she struggled to keep herself awake. “What… happened?”

“I… don’t know,” Hakuno conceded, looking like she didn’t know where to begin to explain, or where to begin to ask. “We found you here almost as if you had land crashed.”

Through her world of pain, the woman managed to scowl at her.

“…Land crashed?” The woman’s grogginess cleared enough that she was able to affix Gilgamesh with a glare as well. “ _Your fault_ ,” she hissed-whispered acidly, something that no one on their right mind would do to the fickle and very volatile King of Heroes and which luckily he wouldn’t have heard properly from that distance, before losing that burst of energy all of a sudden and slumping over unconscious again.

* * *

The tunnels had been a maze, but they eventually managed to make sense of their surroundings, helped by a map they had managed to take from the facility’s data bases when they were deactivating their security system to enter unnoticed, and thus they found their way to their destined location.

Two people stood in front of an elevator leading to the basement floor -and thus to the main lab where the stasis chambers were located. At least, that was what the coordinates of the signal they were supposed to secure said.

The two of them looked identical to each other in every aspect, perfect clockwork twins, except perhaps for the slight differences in their height and physique, meant to tell the unsuspecting eye that they were designed to be of the opposite sex. Otherwise, one wouldn’t be able to tell them apart; the two of them had the same, middle-length black hair that was made even the more striking and gleaming against their pale skin, had the same ink-black eyes, the absence of color in them almost resembling the cold, impersonal darkness of the vacuum of space, and even wore the exact same black uniform.

The man hit the switch and the elevator thrummed to life to carry them both for their final task. Everything else was done. The two of them stepped into the elevator that led to the basement, and she went through their checklist as they lowered the outer gate and slid the inner one closed. …Samples had been collected, data bases downloaded, cameras disconnected…

As per their directives, only one thing remained to be done -bring the source of the signal back to their contractor.

Perhaps it was distasteful of them to desecrate this resting place the way they were doing it, but duty was duty and they weren’t manufactured to think about the implications of such.

Although they knew what they were looking for, they didn’t know what exactly awaited them beyond the Stasis Chamber, and the scenery that greeted them when they reached the main doors wasn’t all that encouraging.

Two bodies, decomposed by the years, lay just outside the door, their skulls blown into arid powder by what looked like shotgun blasts. The man kicked one of them angrily, his boot crunching into the corpse's brittle ribs, the dry snap of bone loud in the silence.

The whole place reeked of sterilizer, bleach and blood. It was a noxious smell that made his nose scrunch up in repulsion. He couldn’t stand it.

“Why must we drench ourselves in this disgusting smell…”

“Well, if you can smell it, that just means you’re still operative. Now hurry, we haven’t got much time. Cut the chatter and help me open this thing.”

The man made a disgusted noise, but nonetheless used the stolen identification card in the electronic panel to open the door.

_Access confirmed._

Red lights turned into green and the door slid open from side to side, granting them access.

They eased into the cryostasis room, a burst of hissing mechanical noise echoing through the corridor before they closed. The chamber had a very high ceiling and was full of computer screens, control panels and cables that twisted around the floor and connected with a series of large glass tubes, each large enough to hold an adult. Next to them were what appeared to be control panels, which the man assumed were used to manipulate the patients and check on their status while in cryostasis.

They moved slowly into the poorly lit chamber, mindful of the fluctuating shadows casted by the towering stasis pods, and as they advanced, they noticed the chamber was bigger than they first gave it credit for; if they went further into the room, more and more pods could be seen in the distance.

“…What is this?”

They stepped into a short hallway, their boots clanking across the floor as their gazes took in their surroundings.

“It looks like… frozen bodies? Dozens, maybe even hundreds are here…”

“Incredible. To think they have been kept down here for so long…”

“Yeah… they’ve been hidden under the city. …But without magic, were they hoping this would amount to something? The odds are fairly dangerous as far as we’ve been told. What do you think they had planned to do with them?” The man asked as he looked about him.

“I don’t know what the hell they thought they were getting close to, but whatever it was, it must be…”

“… … the evening star,” the man said flatly.

“…The scientific Holy Grail; that is what they call it now, is it not? The so-called treasure chest filled with the meaning of life.”

...And they were the Scavengers looking for a key.

The two walked past the pods cautiously, following the signal’s trail deeper within the chamber. The machines seemed almost to be hissing at them as they tried to make sense of everything.

Against the back wall was a much larger tube, at least eight or nine feet tall, hooked up to its own computer console. There was only but one person inside filling it.

She stopped in front of the tube, awed by what they found.

“A body,” he said quietly. “But… shouldn’t there be two?”

She glanced over at him, seeing him frowning down at the computer that was hooked to the tube by multiple cables, and then looked back at the brown-haired boy inside, feeling nearly overwhelmed by pity, but she reminded herself once again, duty was still duty.

The woman sighed.

“One is still better than none. Let’s document as much as we can and download what’s left of the computer memory. We will figure out later what to do when we are back at London with the cargo.” She frowned. “As of now, securing the signal’s source is our top directive.”

She looked down at the myriad switches and buttons, inspecting them and studying the sequence to empty the stasis tube.

There was a set of six red switches in a row along the bottom and the woman flipped one of them down.

At first, nothing seemed to happen. The woman glanced at her partner, and he nodded for her to continue. She switched another, then another and another following the sequence as instructed in the control panel. Some messages that she could translate as _‘empty stasis tube?’_ appeared on screen, and she confirmed the sequence.

It was at that moment that the panel started to display a holographic error message, the screens turning red even as the capsule was being emptied. From within, the boy’s visage twitched in a semblance of rising awareness as the pod’s programming responded to their external instructions to empty it.

And then, suddenly, as time almost seemed to stop for the two at that moment, a shrill alarm blared into the silent room through some hidden speaker in the ceiling. The two jumped, staring around the cold chamber.

Alarms began to flash, their sirens adding to the pre-recorded voice of the security system’s AI as it announced its warning in a cool, female-like voice.

_Emergency, there has been a security breach. Avoid all contact with unauthorized personnel. Repeat, there has been a security breach-_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I always say, I shouldn't be updating when I'm too tired to properly proofread my own things, so I can already tell I will probably come back to correct things, but oh well.


End file.
